Elizabeth Allyn Woock a
a Palacky University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czechia
Abstract
In Céline Keller’s Who is Afraid of Degrowth?, the publicly accessible debate on degrowth is curated and restaged in a comic format. Keller’s illustrations not only visualize the conversations as they happen across a range of platforms—from snappy, heated retorts on “X,” to long scholarly treatises, memes, and infographics floating around the web—but contextualizes them within the network of references and influences. Moreover, drawing on Victor Fei Lim’s framework for multimodal discourse analysis, Keller’s own stance within the debate becomes clear through the illustrations and her staging of the mise en scene and the mise en page (to apply Geraint D’Arcy’s terms, 2020). This review examines how Keller not only indexes the argument for and against debate, but inserts her own arguments through the visual plane, showing how Who is Afraid of Degrowth? imagines an alternative to the current patterns of public discourse.
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References
Cohn, Neil. 2020. Who Understands Comics? Questioning the Universality of Visual Language Comprehension. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.
D'Arcy, Geraint. 2020. Mise en Scène, Acting, and Space in Comics. (Germany: Springer International Publishing).
Degrowth Journal editorial collective. 2023. "Creating a radical, common-sbased, open-access journal for degrowth", Degrowth Journal, Vol 1.
Keller, Céline. 2021. Discourses of Climate Delay. Self-published, celinekeller.com/discourses-of-climate-delay.
Keller, Céline. 2022. Dawn of the ECT. Self-published, celinekeller.com/dawn-of-the-ect.
Keller, Céline. 2024. Who is Afraid of Degrowth? Self-published, celinekeller.com/who-is-afraid-of-degrowth.
Keller, Céline and Elizabeth A. Woock, Interview 18.07.2024.
Lim, Victor Fei. 2002. The Analysis of Language and Visual Images: An Integrative Multisemiotic Approach (Doctoral dissertation, National University of Singapore).
Peeters, Benoît. 2007. '"Four Conceptions of the Page" from Case, planche, recit: lire la bandedessinee.' Jesse Cohn, trans. ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 3 (3): n.p. http://www.english.ufl. edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/peeters/.
Woock, Elizabeth A. 2023. "Rubric and Metrics for Peer Reviewing Research Comics", The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 13(1).
Worden, Daniel. 2024. Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press).
How to cite
APA
A Different Kind of Book Review . (2025). In Degrowth Journal (Vol. 3). https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.02.03
MLA
“A Different Kind of Book Review .” Degrowth Journal, vol. 3, Apr. 2025, https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.02.03.
Chicago
“A Different Kind of Book Review .” 2025. Degrowth Journal. https://doi.org/10.36399/Degrowth.003.02.03.
Harvard
“A Different Kind of Book Review ”(2025) Degrowth Journal. doi:10.36399/Degrowth.003.02.03.