Hello.
I’m Luis Vivanco, cultural anthropologist, dedicated cyclist, karate practitioner, and amateur comics creator.
What happens when all these things meet at an intersection?
Well, this website, for one. Here you’ll encounter a variety of attempts to puzzle through my bicycle-centric passions, as comics, drawings, writings, videos, and sound files.
My work as an anthropologist focuses on the culture and politics of environmentalism, sustainability, and bicycles. I also write anthropology textbooks. Back in 2017, I found myself interacting with comics creators in work I was doing as director of the University of Vermont Humanities Center. Among them were academics publishing comics drawn from their research, and their efforts captured my imagination. So I gave it a try and have not looked back. Creating sequential art is now a key element of how I approach and express some of my research. It is an approach called, variously, “comics-based research” or “comics as research.”
Want to know more? Check out my University of Vermont faculty page where I am Professor and Chair of the Anthropology Department.