I keep a lot of unfinished drawings. Lines that trail off, panels I never filled in, sketches I made because I wanted to see what my hand would do if I let it go somewhere without a destination. For a long time I thought these were the leftovers of my real work, the mess that happens before a story gets found. It took me a while to notice that the most important things were happening there, in the mess, before any story arrived to tidy it up.

That noticing changed how I think about comics-making. I used to treat drawing mainly as a way of telling something I already understood, a delivery system for a story that existed, more or less finished, somewhere in my head before the pencil touched the page. I don’t think that anymore. Drawing, for me, has become less a way of communicating knowledge and more a way of running into it, sideways, in a sketchbook, in a conversation over someone else’s shoulder, in a mark that turns out to know something I didn’t. Not knowledge that arrives complete and ready to be handed over, but knowledge that only exists because the hand went looking for it.

My research lives inside that shift.

For some time, through my postdoctoral project Drawing Lines, I followed this question through comics specifically: what can drawing do as a method of inquiry, instead of as a way of presenting conclusions someone reached by other means? I was not interested in comics as an illustrated report of research already finished elsewhere. I wanted to know what happens to memory, to political change, to ecological crisis, to the feeling of belonging or not belonging somewhere, when you think about them through panels and gutters and lines instead of arguments. Whether a different kind of understanding becomes available once thinking has a body, a page, a pencil moving at the speed a hand actually moves.

If I look across my research, I find myself circling the same word: attention. Attention to memories that never arrive whole. Attention to objects whose histories can’t be fully reconstructed, however hard the reconstruction tries. Attention to the voices that official narratives tend to leave out because a label only has room for so many words. Attention to uncertainty itself, which I’ve come to treat less as something to clear out of the way, and more as the condition that makes it possible to keep asking the question at all.

All of this grows out of somewhere specific. My PhD work was a graphic novel, What Should We Tell Them?, about growing up in Serbia during the 1999 bombing, and about what it means to try to draw a childhood that other people keep insisting on describing for you, as something lost or stolen. Making that book taught me to stop trusting drawing as a way of recovering the past and to start trusting it as a way of staying with the past’s contradictions, the parts of it that refuse to resolve no matter how many times I go back over them with a pencil.

That’s still, more or less, where I work from. I’m not especially interested in comics as a medium built to deliver answers. I’m interested in comics-making as a way of paying attention, of thinking with the world instead of settling for thinking about it from a safe distance.

The questions that guide my work have been made possible through sustained institutional support. In 2020, I received a doctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), which supported my PhD research into memory, comics, and artistic inquiry. In 2024, this trajectory continued through a Postdoctoral Mandate (PDM) from KU Leuven’s Special Research Fund (BOF), enabling me to further explore drawing as a way of thinking, attending to the world, and producing knowledge through artistic practice.

Journal articles (peer-reviewed)

Radanović, D., & Goel, P. (2026). Memory, urgency, practice: Essayistic comics-making as method and intervention. Memory, Mind & Media, 5, e15. doi:10.1017/mem.2026.10041

Radanović, D., Vande Winkel, R., Vansieleghem, N. with Radanović, D. (2023). You draw like a child! Interrogating aetonormative tendencies in imitations of children’s drawings in graphic narratives. Comicalités, (Children’s drawings in Comics), Art.No. 8408. doi: 10.4000/comicalites.8408 Open Access

Invited lectures

Radanović, D. (2023). Multimodality in practice – making and reading multimodal narratives. Invited by the University of Antwerp. Presented at The Children’s Literature summer school, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
Radanović, D. (2022). Rethinking Normative Ideas of Childhood through Artistic Practice, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.

Awards

2022. August, ERC Best Poster Award – In person, European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) Emerging Researcher’s Conference Yerevan, Armenia.
2020. Cross-country Comics Residency Program – the first place, The French Institute in Serbia, the International Center for Comics and Illustration (Angouleme, France), the Komunikart Agency and the City of Pancevo.
2020 – 2024 Research Foundation Flanders – Fundamental Research Scholarship

Abstracts/Presentations/Posters

Radanović, D., Vansieleghem, N., Vanistendael, J. (2023). How Climate Change Changed the Art Class. Presented at  The European Conference on Educational Research, Glasgow, UK.

Radanović, D., Bugno, L., Agostinetto, L. (2023). How Do Future Teachers Represent Cultural Diversity? Investigations of Changes in Cultural Diversity Beliefs Representations After Intercultural Education Course. Presented at The European Conference on Educational Research, Glasgow, UK.

Radanović, D., Lucovnicova, O., Vande Winkel, R. (2023). Between East and West: Auto (Art) Ethnography – Challenges and Reflections. Presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society, Krakow, Poland.

Radanović, D. (2022). From educational research to poster – a presentation of the research project: Rethinking Normative Ideas About Childhood Through Artistic Practice. Presented at the From Educational Research to Poster – PhD Course in Pedagogical, Educational and Instructional Sciences, University of Padova, Padova, Italy.

Radanović, D., Vansieleghem, N., Vande Winkel, R. (2022). Rethinking Normative Ideas About Childhood Through Artistic Practice. (Abstract No. 1851). Presented at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) Emerging Researcher’s Conference, Yerevan, Armenia.

Radanović, D., Vande Winkel, R., Vansieleghem, N. (2022). You Draw Like a Child! Mimicking a Child’s Drawing Style as an Exercise of Aetonormativity. Presented at the Research Workshop: Children’s Drawings in Comics, Ghent University Museum.

Radanović, D. (2021). Project Redrawing childhood. Presented at the Doctoral seminar research unit Image, LUCA School of Arts, Campus Sint-Lucas Ghent, Belgium.

Radanović, D. (2021). Graphic storytelling: an attempt to materialise and transform aetonormativity in the narrative about childhood. Presented at the Children’s Literature Summer School, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Creations in the Arts or Design

2023. Radanović, D. et al. Kod Kuće – Antologija kratkog stripa o radu od kuće i “sa kućom”. Artist’s book. COBISS.SR-ID 12344039.

2023. Tamburić, Ž., Stojanović, M., with contributions by Radanović, D. et al. Beyond Comics: A Look into the Artworks of Comics Authors from Serbia / Izvan kvadrata: Pogled na umetničke radove stripskih autora iz Srbije. Exhibition, International Comics Festival Belgrade / Salon Stripa SKC. COBISS.SR-ID 122894345.

2022. Radanović, D. New image of childhood. (Exhibition). Venue: The House of the Authors / La Maison des Auteurs, Angoulême, France.

Radanović, D. with Kosić, V. (curator) My Room. (Exhibition). Venue: Residence of Princess Ljubica, Belgrade, Serbia.