Anna Pozzali is a Doctoral researcher in Social Anthropology with Visual Media at the University of Manchester, UK. Anna has recently completed a one-year ethnographic fieldwork in north Manchester where she looked at the process of ageing and the role that older people hold in a post-industrial society.

“The comic strip presented here is an extract of the visual work Anna produced for her MA in Visual Anthropology, obtained at the University of Manchester, in 2016. The research adopted a combination of auditory and visual methods (both participants’ and Anna’s drawings, photography and elicitation interviews) with the aim of exploring the meaning of home for a group of older people living in Old Moat, south Manchester.

Participants were invited to take a sequence of photographs representing what home meant to them, a process which was followed by a series of photo-elicitation interviews based on the content of the images they had captured. Anna’s work stemmed from the challenge of representing and conveying intangible spheres of human life such as memories and emotions that had emerged through the photo-elicitation process.

The comic-strip format allowed Anna to combine photographs, interviews and drawings in a way that not only revealed particular insights related to the research subject, but also showed the ways through which she was able to access them. Originally, the work is divided into 8 sections. A prologue which introduces the project and includes aspects of Anna’s subjective position in the field, followed by seven chapters, one of which is presented here.”