A sociologist and a comic strip designer in the Calais jungle

"We arrived in Calais in February 2016, for a weekend and were so overwhelmed by the need to testify, that we decided to stay for several months to follow the development of the "refugee crisis" from day to day until the destruction of the slum town in October 2016". The album Les nouvelles de la Jungle de Calais (News of the Calais Jungle) is the chronicle of an investigation led by two women: Yasmine Bouagga, a researcher in sociology at the Triangle laboratory and Lisa Mendel, author of the comic strip. First published as a blog on LeMonde.fr, the News of the Calais Jungle is today a proper album, recently published by Castermann. The goal: to help understand what happened in Calais, through a real-life story about the daily lives of migrants, of those who help them, of those who control them, and those who are side by side with them. The album gives us " snapshots, in connection with the latest events that we have experienced, sometimes dramatic, often surprising, never boring. " The pace of research in social sciences makes long-term immersion fieldwork possible, creating links and understanding relating to certain subtleties of social relations. The comic strip enables us, with humor and humanity, to reproduce violence, absurdity, and life.