Sketching the Social: Visual Ethnography Workshop

What stories can surface when we observe the world around us through drawing and imagination? In this hands-on visual ethnography workshop, anthropologist Maya El Helou invites participants to create a comic or visual narrative based on collected fieldnotes, a memory, or everyday interaction. Embracing play and experimentation, this workshop aims to stretch the boundaries of how we think about ethnographies. The leading question for this workshop is how do comics and graphic narratives help us understand and interpret our social realities? Combing fieldwork, media, and storytelling, a visual approach to ethnography transforms how research is created, conveyed, and engaged. As El Helou underscores, it asks us to “feel the affect of the visual, which complicates, completes, or makes visible what the written word cannot do.” [1] El Helou will lead discussions on the ethical tenets that guide visual ethnography rooted in lived experience rather than detached observation. True to the workshop’s title, drawing experience is not needed—movement through campus spaces is welcomed for the fieldwork component.

[1] Maya El Helou in conversation with Blackwood staff, May 14, 2026.

No experience necessary. Free and open to all.
Snacks and refreshments will be provided.

Maya El Helou is an anthropologist, comic and visual artist, and writer whose multimodal ethnography explores queer and trans life, affect, state violence and Necropolitics in Beirut. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and Sexual Diversity Studies from the University of Toronto, where she has also taught courses in anthropology, gender, and sexuality studies, as well as at OCAD University. Her dissertation and forthcoming graphic ethnography, Queer and Trans Antagonism Against the Consortium of Let Die in Beirut, is a combination of visual storytelling and ethnographic theory. El Helou’s research and teaching center on collaborative and creative pedagogy that makes scholarship both critical and accessible.

Click here for a detailed campus map and here for directions to UTM.

The Blackwood Gallery is located in the Kaneff Centre on the ground floor. The building is on the south side of campus near Inner Circle Road, adjacent to the campus’ main public transit stop and Student Centre. It features open spaces, round sloped corners, and windows to facilitate visual communication and navigation. Accessible multiuser gendered washrooms are located on the ground and lower levels. The building is AODA-compliant, with wide doorways and powered doors.

This event will include some movement across the campus. Accessible elevators, powered doors, and curb cuts are in place throughout.

An event series on experimental education, movement, and creative pedagogy

Co-curated by Fraser McCallum and Jacqui Usiskin

Rooted in is an invitation to enact alternative modes of learning amid educational austerity that erodes access, experimentation, and critical inquiry. Running alongside the lightbox exhibition, a four-part program series heeds this call throughout the summer. Led by guest contributors whose research spans performance, anthropology, critical disability studies, and social justice education, this program animates reflexive, embodied, and community-sustaining pedagogies. Sessions will foreground culture-rooted practices and plural forms of knowledge-making, engaging choreography, accessibility, illustration, storytelling, dance, and photography as tools for shared learning and artmaking. As in Benohoud’s Classroom, learning will unfolding through collective inquiry, dialogue, and play.

Visit our website for full program descriptions and contributor biographies.