First COMICA workshop invites UiT staff to reflect on academia through humour and comics
Humour and comics became tools for exploring diversity and everyday academic life at the project's opening workshop in Tromsø.
On the 20th of August, UiT staff gathered on campus in Tromsø for the first workshop of COMICA – Comics for Organizational Meaning-making and Inclusive Academic Arena. COMICA uses humour and comics as a way to think differently about academic life. The project invites academics to reflect critically on their own experiences, question dominant narratives, and explore new perspectives on what diversity means in academic spaces, across gender, age, roles, and more.
The COMICA approach builds on a critical participatory action project, The Academic Line that Bertella launched back in 2023, examining the norms, tensions, contradictions and, not least, laughable aspects of academic life. Since then, the idea of using comics and humour has evolved into a broader movement for academics' wellbeing, with findings shared through a scientific publication, an active social media presence, and, recently the COMICA research project.
At the COMICA workshop, participants spent three hours experimenting with comic design. They worked with pre-developed characters, created their own comic characters representing academics, and then brought these together to develop stories in the form of comic strips.
The participants embraced the activities with great enthusiasm and creativity. They eagerly shared their comic stories with the group, using humour to reflect on academic life and its challenges, while creating a lively, positive atmosphere of exchange and collective storytelling.
“Diversity in academia is a hot and often challenging topic. Humour and comics can be powerful tools for exploring it, allowing us to shed light on its lighter side while also finding ways to approach and cope with the more difficult dimensions."
— Giovanna Bertella, project leader for COMICA, Professor at UiT School of Business and Economics
COMICA is a collaboration between from UiT School of Business and Economics and UiT's Centre for Women's and Gender Research. It is funded by the Research Council of Norway and will run from 2026 to 2028, combining hands-on workshops with hybrid seminars featuring keynote speakers on comics and humour theory.
Participants left the workshop with new comic-making skills, a small gift, and, organisers hope, a few fresh perspectives on their own academic surroundings. The next COMICA activity is a webinar with Jorge Cham, PhD Comics creator, on the 16th of October 2026 at 14:15. Details will be disseminated via COMICA events page and on UiT tavla.
For more information about COMICA, contact project leader Giovanna Bertella: giovanna.bertella@uit.no
Short facts
- COMICA is a research project that explores how humour and comics can help deepen our understanding of diversity in academia.
- The Academic Line is a project and a movement aiming at promoting humour and comics among academics to increase well-being and foster change for a more diverse and enjoyable academia.
- The Research Council of Norway program Gender Balance, Diversity and Inclusion in Norwegian Research supports projects that develop innovative measures aimed at gender balance, diversity and inclusion in academia.
- UiTs BalanceHub is an interdisciplinary network connecting researchers, educators, and administrative staff across UiT who are thinking critically about what equality and diversity require structurally and culturally.
- Giovanna Bertella and Lilli Mittner has been recently appointed as active members of UiT's Equality and Diversity Committee.
Kortnytt fra Institutt for filosofi og førstesemesterstudier, Fakultet for humaniora, samfunnsvitenskap og lærerutdanning, Fakultet for biovitenskap, fiskeri og økonomi, Handelshøgskolen ved UiT, Senter for kvinne- og kjønnsforskning
