BECAS
BUGALLO LucÍa
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Adolescents creating cartoons: a cognitive and discursive challenge
Autor/es:
BUGALLO, LUCÍA
Lugar:
Bonn
Reunión:
Simposio; Symposium on Humour and Laughter: Theory, Research and Applications; 2019
Institución organizadora:
ISS, Humor Hilft Heilen y University of Bonn
Resumen:
The general goal of this study is to contribute to better understand the semiotic and cognitive challenges that take place in cartooning and to identify and characterise different strategies that adolescents put into play when they are asked to create a cartoon. As other humorous productions, cartooning presents many benefits from the standpoint of cognitive development. Far from being just an entertainment, cartooning allows to resignify personal experiences and to problematise the social reality.Despite the importance of humor in psychology, developmental studies on humor have focused on humor interpretation and the production of situational and verbal humor. They have also focused in childhood until early adolescence. In our study, we propose an integrated analysis of thematic, pragmatic, rhetoric, and modal resources in cartoons created by adolescents (10 to 19 years old) from an interdisciplinary approach, which involves: developmental, learning and cognitive psychology, semiotics, communication and humor studies.Regarding thematic and pragmatic aspects, we explore the topics addressed in adolescents? productions, and how they relate to the authors` motivations, age and gender. Rhetorical resources are also identified, in relation to the posible sophistication in the use of specific rhetorical figures according to age. We also examine how the participants articulate verbal and visual modes in their cartoons, and the strategies they adopte to create an intelligible production.Our corpus comes from ten workshops of cartoon production and interpretation we offered between 2015 and 2018 in different educational contexts (informal and formal), in Bariloche and General Roca, Argentina. A total of 170 Argentinian adolescents participated.Our results show that most of the adolescents managed to create a humorous effect in their texts. They were capable of complementing different visual and verbal resources (including speech balloons, cinetic lines, labels and captions as the most frequent) used with greater or lesser degree of conventionality and innovation.A huge variety of themes were addressed in the cartoons (e.g sociopolitical issues, stereotypes, violence, free time activities, daily living, bonding, emotional states, human and nature or technology relationship, among others), which respond to playful or/and committed motivations. Some age variations have been found in the profiles of texts adolescents create. Youngest adolescents (10-12 years olds) tended to create playful cartoons about comical situations and chose a strip format, whereas the oldest ones (16-19 years olds) created more committed cartoons (characterized by an interest to address social and socio-political problems), used more than one semantic field to create the humorous effect, and preferred a single panel format. With regard to gender, some variations were found in males, who manifest a tendency to playfulness.Our research highlights the extent to which graphic humor is as a suitable, powerful and attractive object to express their point of view about social matters and means of learning.