How can we engage with art and popular culture beyond our visual senses? On November 13, 2025 at iSchool Community Learning Day, PhD candidate V Rahbar hosted the Accessible Arts and Popular Culture Workshop which explored art as a multi-sensory medium. The workshop included presentations by Dr. Akiko Takesue (Royal Ontario Museum) and Kay Slater (grunt gallery), a touch tour led by Tomoko Kitayama Yen and Chelsea Shriver (UBC Library), and a tactile art room experience with V Rahbar.
Thanks to the work of UBC School of Information students Care Barker and Miriam Rojas, the workshop is now available through graphic recording comics and accompanying textual descriptions. The workshop and graphic recordings were generously funded by the Pop Pedagogies Award Program.
Care Barker (she/they) is a Canadian comic artist, writer, and aspiring librarian. Her research focuses on equity, accessibility, and using comics for knowledge translation. She lives with her husband, child, large fluffy cat, and long-suffering houseplants. In her spare time, she is an MLIS student at UBC School of Information.
Miriam Rojas (she/her) is a UBC School of Information Master of Library and Information Studies student. While she has been making comics for many years, this is her first graphic recording work.
Victoria Rahbar (she/they) is a Ph.D. candidate at University of British Columbia’s School of Information. Her research focuses on manga narratives about disability and neurodiversity. They also conduct non-visual, tactile, and multisensory arts-based research with popular culture objects and accessible comics.
