The neurodiversity paradigm has raised from autism rights movement and advocates for the acknowledgment of variations in cognition and behavior as diversities and not disorders. Addressing a wide range of sensory, behavioral, and cognitive variations such as ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder), and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), the neurodiversity paradigm engages with a social understanding of these variations as (dis)abilities by emphasizing on the importance of recognizing them as different ways of being, while at the same time foregrounding the pain of the neurodivergent community in navigating a world which does not accommodate their sensitivities. ‘Sensitivity’, at sensory and emotional levels and to various stimuli, is one of the main nodes that connect such different variations. Interestingly, (hyper)sensitivity has as well been a popular characterization tool for the creation of more-than-human characters in works of speculative fiction that address the climate crisis. A notable example, and the focus of this paper, is Lauren Olamina, the main character in Octavia E. Butler’s celebrated novel, Parable of the Sower: a character who can feel the pain of the others, a trait which is shared by many neurodivergent people in their experiences of over-empathizing. In this paper, I will look at the different materializations of this character in the novel as well its adaptations, particularly its comics adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings (2020), with a neurodivergent lens, to put in dialogue the two narratives of climatic apocalypse and neurodiversity. Doing so, I vouch for foregrounding ‘sensitivity’ in the discourses around climate justice and I argue that acknowledging the knowledge and perception of neurodivergent communities can lead to a better understanding of new forms of life and existing futures. 

Comparing source and target media products is the primordial intermedial method for studying adaptations. The inventory of similarities and differences produced by such endeavor provides evidence for the processes of transfer and transformation that have happened between the two media. But the finished media products are not the only traces of the process of adaptation. In practices of adaptation that happen inside media industries, such as film adaptations, the process is documented as well in different forms and for different archival or market-oriented purposes. The process of film adaptation is for instance usually captured, though in fragments and in a staged format, by the intermediary filmic media products – such as ‘making of’s – that are rarely considered as the main study objects in adaptation studies. 

As this article argues, such processual ways of looking at adaptations do not undermine the importance of comparative approaches but complicate the grounds for comparison. Suggesting a methodological shift to the process, the article expands this idea through a cross-pollination between adaptation studies and (media) production studies and exemplifies it through discussion of examples and one extended case study. 

This paper focuses on the relation between the two media types of novel and museum at the macro level, and the two entities of ‘thing’ and ‘moment’ at the micro level, analyzing Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. In this minor practice of transmedial storytelling, collecting, hoarding, and exhibiting things is intertwined with the act of narration and consequently the spatiotemporal and material dimensions of novel and museum have affected one another at their points of differences. This porosity of media borders manifests itself for instance in the way description has turned into thing-dropping (name dropping the objects) in the novel, or the way a copy of the book would work as a ticket at the museum in Istanbul. Looking at the way narration is framed with an archival and material approach, the paper tests the viability of ‘thing-moment’ as a concept in such a context as Museum of Innocence where materiality of the narrative and the narrativity of the material environment are foregrounded.

“Urban experience” and “imprisonment” sound like an absolute contradiction between two mutually exclusive conditions. Prisons are, however, functioning parts of the cities, hiding the judicially excluded citizens or undocumented individuals from the city’s face. A significant element of punishment and control in most of the modern prisons have been to ban or control the prisoners’ access to media and communication devices, a strategy that works as a further layer of exclusion from the urban life.

Things have however changed with Internet. Smuggling mobiles in detention centers or having limited access to Internet in some more ‘open’ forms of detention, lots of prisoners around the world have been producing content and connecting to the rest of the city/world through media. One example is “Prison Blog”, a genre of blogging that have existed for almost two decades. This media opportunity has been seized by a few ‘insiders’ to communicate with the ‘outside’, with famous examples like Chelsea Manning, the American whistleblower who used to blog while in prison.Offering an outline of the specificities and the history of this genre of blogging, this paper investigates the forms of urban membership and urban experience new media offers to those who are judicially excluded from the urban life.

No type of effective activism would take shape without communities, networks, and collectives. Non-male communities have been devalued and antagonized within patriarchal structures, through various explicit and implicit strategies such as stereotyping, ridicule, and formal persecution. Consequently, the mere formation of non-male collectives at the heart of patriarchal structures can be a feminist and activist endeavor, even without outspoken activist agendas. Collectivity emerges as well recurrently in relation to the medium of comics at different levels: collective authorships, collective milieus and movements of production, and the collectivity suggested through the multimodal materiality of the medium. 

     In this paper, I will focus on the collective potentials of the medium of comics, at the social and material levels, by offering a case study of Drawing the line, Indian women fight back! (Kuriyan, Bertonasco et al. 2015). Drawing the line is an anthology consisting of works by fourteen Indian comic artists who reflect upon their experiences of gender violence. As this paper will demonstrate, through the anthology format, collective and transcultural publication, collective authorship, and depiction of collective histories, Drawing the line sets an example for the way comics, as a medium, can be inherently activist through its potentials for collective enunciation. Furthermore, showcasing an example of collective feminist action through drawing and storytelling, Drawing the line also creates potentials for intercultural community building with its Western counterparts such as Drawing Power (Noomin and Gay 2019). To flesh out the latter point, the paper will conclude with expanding on the potentials of ‘comics anthology’ as an activist format. 

Media products of all sorts form a complex web of different relationships. Media products involve transformations, integrations and combinations as well as transmedial aspects. When we look at media combinations in this chapter, all these different aspects are brought into play. Media combinations of different basic media types are always, literally, intermedial combinations that involve intermedial relations between different forms of communication.

This chapter deals with different kinds of combinations of technical, basic and qualified media types in comics, films, radio drama, songs/singing and music videos. Some of them are more obvious in this aspect. The music video, for instance, integrates sound, words and (moving) images. The pages of comics display text and image, and these two basic media types communicate differently in the semiotic modality. In radio dramas or songs, the combination aspect is not as visually apparent. Still, the soundwaves of a song or a radio drama firmly integrate several auditory media types.

With specific examples, we discuss how to understand the different intermedial aspects at play whenever different media types are brought together in a particular media product. Different perspectives are possible. Should one focus on the combination of different forms of meaning-making, or instead stress how deeply integrated these different media types are? Should one approach a song as the combination of different qualified media (poetry and music), or focus on the close integration of different auditory media types (words and organized sound)? When we approach media combinations with the four modalities, we can focus on both. When words, (moving) images, and organized sounds are brought together in media products, such as comics, songs and music videos, they form an integrated whole. We can focus on how different basic media types in the material and sensorial modality are firmly integrated. We can then explore how these integrations on pages, in soundwaves, on stages or in the studio enable an intricate combination of different forms of meaning-making that support and interact with each other in the spatiotemporal and semiotic modality.

First, we will take a look at how words and images on pages convey a graphic narrative in comics. Then we will highlight the importance of sound effects in the complex combination of moving images and auditory media types in film. We then explore how different auditory basic and qualified media types together create a complex auditory narrative in radio drama, using the specific example of The Unforgiven (2018). We will also discuss how word and music combine on different levels in art and pop songs. The chapter will end with a few reflections on the audiovisual combinations of basic and qualified media types at work in music videos.

This chapter provides examples of basic analyses of macro and micro levels of intermediality in social media: YouTube entertainment, an example of a multi-layered social media practice, and GIFs, which derive from other media and migrate across different platforms on the internet. Apart from media combination and integration, even the two aspects of media transformation, transmediation and representation, are also persistent intermedial processes in social media practice as content creation. Social media entertainment stages the body, voice and personality, or persona, of a content creator outside the traditional media and acknowledges, or even addresses, the social community directly. In the authenticity discourse of social media entertainment, YouTubers pose themselves as an alternative to traditional media. The chapter looks at the Let’s Play genre and how the YouTuber PewDiePie engages with the social media entertainment dimensions and with his audiences.

This thesis studies the process and products of migratory self-adaptation: the practice of a migrant author recreating their own work in a new medium, and the baggage it brings with itself. Migratory self-adaptation is developed and analyzed in this research through a comparative and processual analysis of two cases of adaptation: Persepolis, a French autobiographical graphic novel written and drawn by Marjane Satrapi, the Franco- Iranian artist and writer, later turned into an animation movie co-written and codirected by Satrapi herself; and The Patience Stone, a novel written in French by Atiq Rahimi, the Franco-Afghan author, which is adapted to a homonymous film in Dari- Persian, co-written and directed by the author.

With their intercultural position, migrant authors face particular challenges of positionality, visibility, inclusion, and survival. Various strategies have been developed to address these challenges and migratory self-adaptation, as is argued and demonstrated throughout this research, brings several of these strategies together. The research argues that the authorship constructed through migratory self-adaptation is multi-directional, transmedial, and transcultural. This multi-dimensional authorship is analyzed through the extended case studies, which include contexts as well as texts and processes alongside the products.

Both works engage with narratives of violence, trauma, and oppression, respectively in Iran and Afghanistan, and address home and host cultures at varying degrees. In their multiple trajectories across media, languages, and geographies, they occupy different positions and offer varied possibilities for interpretation. As this study illustrates, transmedial movements, translational practices, borderworks, and memory acts are various facets of migratory self-adaptation materialized in Persepolis and The Patience Stone.

The study adopts an interdisciplinary approach in theory and methodology and develops a transmedial understanding of migrant authorship and a multi-layered understanding of adaptation. In doing so, it joins the disciplines of intermediality and adaptation studies with literature and cinema of migration and also integrates theories of authorship, translation, border, and memory. By discussing various faces of adaptation in the migratory situation and the interconnection between different cultural mechanisms, this research addresses some of the fundamental questions regarding authoring in migration, including but not restricted to translational communication, cultural difference, dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, and survival.

This chapter looks at three different cases, which extend from literature to protest, to examine the multimodality of translation and translanguaging in intercultural communication. The cases include excerpts from the novel On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, the graphic novel Persepolis and practices of lip-sewing among refugees, as documented in online media. They represent different communicative events involving migrants and refugees. What stands out in all three cases, despite their differences, is the way those involved resort to modes beyond language—such as gestures, performance and silence—to attract attention and make themselves comprehensible in their non-native language. The movement across languages and beyond language is formulated here as multimodal translanguaging, shown to be a recurrent aspect of migrant and intercultural communication. The cases studied in this chapter are chosen from aesthetic and journalistic representations of such communicative events in an attempt to connect the aesthetic with the everyday and the political. A multimodal approach to intercultural communication is useful in that it can show the extent to which various modes of communication can work as mechanisms of inclusion or exclusion in the life of migrants.