Public linguistics is any kind of activity in which linguistics is being communicated in the public sphere, including popular science books, podcasts, TikToks, informal Youtube videos, museum exhibits, public lectures, children’s books, and more (Price & McIntyre 2023). I am a public linguist (someone who educates the public about linguistics), and L'IMAGE is a public linguistics project.

 

I've coined the term graphic linguistics to describe a subfield of linguistics: the use of comics  for the communication of linguistics, and the scholarship of the use of comics in linguistics. I intend this term to be fairly broad: people using comics privately in their linguistics classrooms is graphic linguistics, and so is the public use of comics for linguistics education, like the L'IMAGE Project. Graphic linguistics is inspired by graphic medicine: the use of comics for discourse on healthcare (Green & Myers 2010, Williams 2012, Czerwiec et al. 2020).

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References

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Czerwiec, M., Williams, I., Squier, S. M., Green, M. J., Myers, K. R., & Smith, S. T. (2020). Graphic Medicine Manifesto. Penn State Press.

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Green, M. J., & Myers, K. R. (2010). Graphic medicine: use of comics in medical education and patient care. BMJ, 340.

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Price, H., & McIntyre, D. (2023). Public linguistics. In Communicating Linguistics (pp. 3-14). Routledge.

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Williams, I. C. (2012). Graphic medicine: comics as medical narrative. Medical Humanities, 38(1), 21-27.