Illustrators are increasingly connecting with community groups and members of the public to explore links between people, local knowledge and image making practices. This raises a number of questions: What processes are set in motion when illustrators seek to engage with community? How can illustration bring to light the concerns, interests and challenges of a group of people? And can illustration help us think about the conditions of sociability more generally?

Luise Vormittag argues that these questions go to the core of what it means to be political. Using both her own work and other illustrators’ projects as case studies Vormittag suggests that participatory illustration is a particularly effective medium for illuminating and reflecting on our social interdependence. Rather than accepting conventional, often nostalgic or identitarian notions of community, she positions it as a shared practice of communication and collaborative sense-making. Illustrations that refer to collective matters of concern can be the catalyst, focal point and trace of relational and dialogic interactions.

This book is a contribution to the burgeoning field of illustration research that aims to extend the discipline through theoretically grounded practice-led research. By intertwining illustration practice with European philosophy and drawing on ideas from ethnography, translation studies and theories of the public sphere, Vormittag offers new conceptual pathways for rethinking the practice and potential of illustration.