Peek Inside the Lab

Peek Inside the Lab

Peek Inside the Lab is a cycle of storytelling activities used to generate comics about the everyday experiences of scientists. The project was co-created by Tracey Bullington, an art educator, and Namita Khajanchi, a biomedical engineer. Over a yearlong collaboration, we created a printed zine which tells the individual stories of scientists in our community while also documenting the process of working and making art across disciplines at our institution, University of Wisconsin—Madison. Our completed publication is part graphic novel and part scrapbook-style documentation, including reflective writing, images of events, and other artifacts from our process. Together, we developed the following overarching questions which guide our partnership and bridge our distinct fields of research:

1. How can comics and other forms of multimodal writing make stories of scientific research accessible to a broad audience, especially to communities who have been systemically excluded from science in academia?

2. How can scientists, especially those with no background in the arts, employ comics to narrate stories of their research, develop community, and share work beyond their academic field?

We presented our work at the 2023 Conference on Community Writing by the Coalition for Community Writing in Denver, Colorado.

Download the zine here.