Humour and comics for academic change and well-being

Abstract

Considering recent calls for change towards a more liveable tourism academia, we combined critical participatory action research with duoethnography to develop The Academic Line—a humorous comic project about academic life. We used traditional theories of humour to leverage the effectiveness of comics as communicative devices and explored how and to what extent our project promoted solidarity, reflexivity, well-being, and change. This study reveals our concrete commitment to fostering change within and potentially improving academia, and to experiment with a form of communication, which is still underexplored in the scholarly sphere but fruitfully applied in other contexts to raise awareness of and prompt discussion about crucially important issues.