![Lisa El Refaie](https://profiles-cardiff.imgix.net/attachments/1769?w=200&h=200&auto=format&crop=faces&fit=crop&q=90")
Dr Lisa El Refaie
- Media commentator
- Available for postgraduate supervision
Teams and roles for Lisa El Refaie
Emeritus Reader
Overview
My main research interests are in visual and multimodal forms of communication, with a particular focus on metaphor.
I am the author two monographs:
Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012), which was shortlisted for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards 2013 (Best Scholarly/Academic Work category).
Visual Metaphor and Embodiment in Graphic Illness Narratives, which was published with Oxford University Press in 2019.
In collaboration with Dr. Sofia Gameiro at the Cardiff School of Psychology, we designed a drawing workshop method (DrawingOut) that encourages people affected by invisible diseases (such as infertility, endometriosis, and ME) to express their experiences through visual metaphor. With funding from the ESRC, we created a website, drawingout.uk, that makes DrawingOut available to individuals and provides detailed guidelines and materials for organisations who would like to run their own drawing workshops.
Currently, I am working with my colleague Dr. Christina Thatcher on an AHRC funded impact project that uses creative drawing and writing to invite both adults and children to engage imaginatively with plants and animals that may not be immediately appealing, including weeds, molluscs and insects. In an Open Access article for Metaphor and Symbol, we demonstrate that such creative engagement may foster greater eco-empathy - empathy directed towards the natural world.
Publication
2025
- El Refaie, E. and Thatcher, C. 2025. Becoming buttercups: Fostering eco-empathy through metaphorical creative writing. Metaphor and Symbol 40 (2), pp.99-113. (10.1080/10926488.2024.2431075)
2022
- Bliesemann de Guevara, B. et al., 2022. Drawing out experiential conflict knowledge in Myanmar: arts-based methods in qualitative research with conflict-affected communities. Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 17 (1), pp.22-41. (10.1177/15423166211015971)
- El Refaie, E. 2022. Chapter 5. Creative visual metaphors of protracted and frozen time in autobiographical comics about depression. In: Piatta, A. , Gordejuela, A. and Alcaraz Carrion, D. eds. Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity. Vol. 75, , pp.101-124. (10.1075/hcp.75.05elr)
2020
- El Refaie, E. et al. 2020. Pictorial and spatial metaphor in the drawings of a culturally diverse group of women with fertility problems. Visual Communication 19 (2), pp.257-280. (10.1177/1470357218784622)
2019
- El Refaie, E. 2019. Visual metaphor and embodiment in graphic illness narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Gameiro, S. et al. 2019. Women from diverse minority ethnic or religious backgrounds desire more infertility education and more culturally and personally sensitive fertility care. Human Reproduction 34 (9), pp.1735-1745. (10.1093/humrep/dez156)
2018
- Gameiro, S. et al. 2018. DrawingOut - an innovative drawing workshop method to support the generation and dissemination of research findings. PLoS ONE 13 (9) e0203197. (10.1371/journal.pone.0203197)
2016
- El Refaie, E. 2016. Analysing metaphors in multimodal texts. In: Semino, E. and Demjén, Z. eds. The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language. Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics London: Routledge. , pp.148-162.
2015
- El Refaie, E. 2015. Reconsidering 'image metaphor' in the light of perceptual simulation theory. Metaphor and Symbol 30 (1), pp.63-76. (10.1080/10926488.2014.948799)
- El Refaie, E. 2015. Scoring a goal or an own-goal against disease? A multilevel framework for describing metaphor coherence in health campaigns. Metaphor and the Social World 5 (1), pp.102 -123. (10.1075/msw.5.1.06ref)
2014
- El Refaie, E. 2014. Appearances and dis/dys-appearances: a dynamic view of embodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Metaphor and the Social World 4 (1), pp.109-125. (10.1075/msw.4.1.08ref)
- El Refaie, E. 2014. Heterosemiosis: mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts. Semiotica 2014 (202), pp.21-39. (10.1515/sem-2013-0094)
- El Refaie, E. 2014. Looking on the dark and bright side: Creative metaphors of depression in two graphic memoirs. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 29 (1), pp.149-174. (10.1080/08989575.2014.921989)
- Froceville, C. , El Refaie, E. and Meesters, G. 2014. Stylistics in comics. In: Burke, M. ed. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies London: Routledge. , pp.485-499.
- Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E. 2014. Youth citizenship beyond consensus: Examining the role of satire and humour for critical engagements in citizenship education. In: Buckingham, D. , Bragg, S. and Kehily, M. eds. Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media. Studies in Childhood and Youth Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. , pp.225-241.
- Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E. 2014. Transnational citizenship, dissent and the political geographies of youth. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (3), pp.444-456. (10.1111/tran.12033)
2013
- El Refaie, E. 2013. Cross-modal resonances in creative multimodal metaphors: Breaking out of conceptual prisons. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2), pp.236-249. (10.1075/rcl.11.2.02elr)
- El Refaie, E. 2013. Transnational identity as shape-shifting: Metaphor and cultural resonance in Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese. In: Denson, S. , Meyer, C. and Stein, D. eds. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. Oxford: Continuum. , pp.33-48.
2012
- El Refaie, E. 2012. Autobiographical comics: Life writing in pictures. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
- El Refaie, E. 2012. Of men, mice, and monsters: Body images in David Small's 'Stitches: A Memoir'. Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics 3 (1), pp.55-67. (10.1080/21504857.2012.661751)
2011
- El Refaie, E. 2011. The pragmatics of humor reception: Young people’s responses to a newspaper cartoon. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 24 (1), pp.87-108. (10.1515/HUMR.2011.005)
2010
- El Refaie, E. 2010. Subjective Time in David B's Graphic Memoir 'Epileptic'. Studies in Comics 1 (2), pp.281-299. (10.1386/stic.1.2.281_1)
- El Refaie, E. 2010. Visual Modality Versus Authenticity: The Example of Autobiographical Comics. Visual Studies 25 (2), pp.162-174. (10.1080/1472586X.2010.502674)
- El Refaie, E. and Hörschelmann, K. 2010. Young people's readings of a political cartoon and the concept of multimodal literacy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31 (2), pp.195-207. (10.1080/01596301003679719)
2009
- El Refaie, E. 2009. Metaphor in political cartoons: exploring audience responses. In: Forceville, C. J. and Urios-Aparisi, E. eds. Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. , pp.173-96.
- El Refaie, E. 2009. Multiliteracies: How readers interpret political cartoons. Visual Communication 8 (2), pp.181-205. (10.1177/1470357209102113)
- El Refaie, E. 2009. What makes us laugh? verbo-visual humour in newspaper cartoons. In: Ventola, E. and Guijarro, A. J. M. eds. The World Told and the World Shown: Multisemiotic Issues. London; New York: Palgrave. , pp.75-89.
2006
- El Refaie, E. 2006. The Austrian tabloid newspaper Neue Kronen Zeitung and its campaigns against people who "foul their own nest". In: Brinks, J. H. , Timms, E. and Rock, S. eds. Nationalist Myths and Modern Media: Contested Identities in the Age of Globalization: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalisation. International Library of Political Studies London: I. B. Tauris. , pp.173-186.
2005
- El Refaie, E. 2005. Our purebred ethnic compatriots: Subversive irony in newspaper journalism. Journal of Pragmatics 37 (6), pp.781-797. (10.1016/j.pragma.2004.10.017)
- El Refaie, E. 2005. Strangers in Schengen Europe: discursive constructions of refugees in Austrian newspaper texts and images. In: Partridge, J. ed. Getting into German: Multidisciplinary Linguistic Approaches. German Linguistic and Cultural Studies Bern: Peter Lang. , pp.219-243.
2004
- El Refaie, E. 2004. Competing discourses about Austria's Nazi past and racist bomb attacks in the 1990s. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 12 (2), pp.215-230. (10.1080/1460846042000250909)
- El Refaie, E. 2004. Dramatist with a talent for dramatisation: Elfriede Jelinek's manipulation of the media. German Life and Letters 57 (3), pp.327-341. (10.1111/j.0016-8777.2004.00288.x)
2003
- El Refaie, E. 2003. Understanding visual metaphor: The example of newspaper cartoons. Visual Communication 2 (1), pp.75-95. (10.1177/1470357203002001755)
2002
- El Refaie, E. 2002. Keeping the truce? Austrian press politics between the July Agreement (1936) and the Anschluss (1938). German History 20 (1), pp.44-66. (10.1093/0266355402gh242oa)
2001
- El Refaie, E. 2001. Metaphors we discriminate by: Naturalised themes in Austrian newspaper artices about asylum seekers. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (3), pp.352-371. (10.1111/1467-9481.00154)
Articles
- Bliesemann de Guevara, B. et al., 2022. Drawing out experiential conflict knowledge in Myanmar: arts-based methods in qualitative research with conflict-affected communities. Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 17 (1), pp.22-41. (10.1177/15423166211015971)
- El Refaie, E. 2014. Appearances and dis/dys-appearances: a dynamic view of embodiment in Conceptual Metaphor Theory. Metaphor and the Social World 4 (1), pp.109-125. (10.1075/msw.4.1.08ref)
- El Refaie, E. 2004. Competing discourses about Austria's Nazi past and racist bomb attacks in the 1990s. Journal of Contemporary European Studies 12 (2), pp.215-230. (10.1080/1460846042000250909)
- El Refaie, E. 2013. Cross-modal resonances in creative multimodal metaphors: Breaking out of conceptual prisons. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2), pp.236-249. (10.1075/rcl.11.2.02elr)
- El Refaie, E. 2004. Dramatist with a talent for dramatisation: Elfriede Jelinek's manipulation of the media. German Life and Letters 57 (3), pp.327-341. (10.1111/j.0016-8777.2004.00288.x)
- El Refaie, E. 2014. Heterosemiosis: mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts. Semiotica 2014 (202), pp.21-39. (10.1515/sem-2013-0094)
- El Refaie, E. 2002. Keeping the truce? Austrian press politics between the July Agreement (1936) and the Anschluss (1938). German History 20 (1), pp.44-66. (10.1093/0266355402gh242oa)
- El Refaie, E. 2014. Looking on the dark and bright side: Creative metaphors of depression in two graphic memoirs. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 29 (1), pp.149-174. (10.1080/08989575.2014.921989)
- El Refaie, E. 2001. Metaphors we discriminate by: Naturalised themes in Austrian newspaper artices about asylum seekers. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5 (3), pp.352-371. (10.1111/1467-9481.00154)
- El Refaie, E. 2009. Multiliteracies: How readers interpret political cartoons. Visual Communication 8 (2), pp.181-205. (10.1177/1470357209102113)
- El Refaie, E. 2012. Of men, mice, and monsters: Body images in David Small's 'Stitches: A Memoir'. Journal of Graphic Novels & Comics 3 (1), pp.55-67. (10.1080/21504857.2012.661751)
- El Refaie, E. 2005. Our purebred ethnic compatriots: Subversive irony in newspaper journalism. Journal of Pragmatics 37 (6), pp.781-797. (10.1016/j.pragma.2004.10.017)
- El Refaie, E. 2015. Reconsidering 'image metaphor' in the light of perceptual simulation theory. Metaphor and Symbol 30 (1), pp.63-76. (10.1080/10926488.2014.948799)
- El Refaie, E. 2015. Scoring a goal or an own-goal against disease? A multilevel framework for describing metaphor coherence in health campaigns. Metaphor and the Social World 5 (1), pp.102 -123. (10.1075/msw.5.1.06ref)
- El Refaie, E. 2010. Subjective Time in David B's Graphic Memoir 'Epileptic'. Studies in Comics 1 (2), pp.281-299. (10.1386/stic.1.2.281_1)
- El Refaie, E. 2011. The pragmatics of humor reception: Young people’s responses to a newspaper cartoon. HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research 24 (1), pp.87-108. (10.1515/HUMR.2011.005)
- El Refaie, E. 2003. Understanding visual metaphor: The example of newspaper cartoons. Visual Communication 2 (1), pp.75-95. (10.1177/1470357203002001755)
- El Refaie, E. 2010. Visual Modality Versus Authenticity: The Example of Autobiographical Comics. Visual Studies 25 (2), pp.162-174. (10.1080/1472586X.2010.502674)
- El Refaie, E. and Hörschelmann, K. 2010. Young people's readings of a political cartoon and the concept of multimodal literacy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 31 (2), pp.195-207. (10.1080/01596301003679719)
- El Refaie, E. et al. 2020. Pictorial and spatial metaphor in the drawings of a culturally diverse group of women with fertility problems. Visual Communication 19 (2), pp.257-280. (10.1177/1470357218784622)
- El Refaie, E. and Thatcher, C. 2025. Becoming buttercups: Fostering eco-empathy through metaphorical creative writing. Metaphor and Symbol 40 (2), pp.99-113. (10.1080/10926488.2024.2431075)
- Gameiro, S. et al. 2018. DrawingOut - an innovative drawing workshop method to support the generation and dissemination of research findings. PLoS ONE 13 (9) e0203197. (10.1371/journal.pone.0203197)
- Gameiro, S. et al. 2019. Women from diverse minority ethnic or religious backgrounds desire more infertility education and more culturally and personally sensitive fertility care. Human Reproduction 34 (9), pp.1735-1745. (10.1093/humrep/dez156)
- Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E. 2014. Transnational citizenship, dissent and the political geographies of youth. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (3), pp.444-456. (10.1111/tran.12033)
Book sections
- El Refaie, E. 2016. Analysing metaphors in multimodal texts. In: Semino, E. and Demjén, Z. eds. The Routledge Handbook of Metaphor and Language. Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics London: Routledge. , pp.148-162.
- El Refaie, E. 2022. Chapter 5. Creative visual metaphors of protracted and frozen time in autobiographical comics about depression. In: Piatta, A. , Gordejuela, A. and Alcaraz Carrion, D. eds. Time Representations in the Perspective of Human Creativity. Vol. 75, , pp.101-124. (10.1075/hcp.75.05elr)
- El Refaie, E. 2009. Metaphor in political cartoons: exploring audience responses. In: Forceville, C. J. and Urios-Aparisi, E. eds. Multimodal Metaphor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. , pp.173-96.
- El Refaie, E. 2005. Strangers in Schengen Europe: discursive constructions of refugees in Austrian newspaper texts and images. In: Partridge, J. ed. Getting into German: Multidisciplinary Linguistic Approaches. German Linguistic and Cultural Studies Bern: Peter Lang. , pp.219-243.
- El Refaie, E. 2006. The Austrian tabloid newspaper Neue Kronen Zeitung and its campaigns against people who "foul their own nest". In: Brinks, J. H. , Timms, E. and Rock, S. eds. Nationalist Myths and Modern Media: Contested Identities in the Age of Globalization: Cultural Identity in the Age of Globalisation. International Library of Political Studies London: I. B. Tauris. , pp.173-186.
- El Refaie, E. 2013. Transnational identity as shape-shifting: Metaphor and cultural resonance in Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese. In: Denson, S. , Meyer, C. and Stein, D. eds. Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads. Oxford: Continuum. , pp.33-48.
- El Refaie, E. 2009. What makes us laugh? verbo-visual humour in newspaper cartoons. In: Ventola, E. and Guijarro, A. J. M. eds. The World Told and the World Shown: Multisemiotic Issues. London; New York: Palgrave. , pp.75-89.
- Froceville, C. , El Refaie, E. and Meesters, G. 2014. Stylistics in comics. In: Burke, M. ed. The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies London: Routledge. , pp.485-499.
- Hörschelmann, K. and El Refaie, E. 2014. Youth citizenship beyond consensus: Examining the role of satire and humour for critical engagements in citizenship education. In: Buckingham, D. , Bragg, S. and Kehily, M. eds. Youth Cultures in the Age of Global Media. Studies in Childhood and Youth Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. , pp.225-241.
Books
- El Refaie, E. 2012. Autobiographical comics: Life writing in pictures. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
- El Refaie, E. 2019. Visual metaphor and embodiment in graphic illness narratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Research
Apart from my current research interests outlined in the Overview section, I have also been involved in a number of other projects, including the following:
I led a British Academy funded research project that explored young British people's interpretations of newspaper cartoons, Editorial Cartoons and Geopolitical Perceptions (in collaboration with the Human Geographer Kathrin Hörschelmann from Durham University).
I collaborated with WhizzKids United, an international NGO based in South Africa, using comics drawing workshops to encourage teenagers to express their thoughts and feelings about HIV and Ebola, and to share important health messages with their peers.
I was also involved with a Welsh Crucible-funded pilot study (led by Dr. Sofia Gameiro at the Cardiff School of Psychology), which explores the use of drawing workshops as a way of investigating and disseminating findings about the infertility experiences of Black and ethnic minority women in Wales. The project won the Welsh Crucible/Learned Society of Wales Award for the Best Collaborative Welsh Crucible Project 2011-2015, as well as being shortlisted for the Wales Social Research Awards 2017 (Innovation category).
Together with my colleague Dr. Michelle Aldridge, and working with local organisations such as Mirus, People First and Innovate Trust (charities supporting independent living), we developed a new visual communication system for people with a learning disability in sheltered accommodation. Our website allows interested parties to access these tools for free. This work was funded by the ESRC impact accelerator fund ('Developing collaborative visual recording techniques for use with adults with learning disabilities').
Biography
I joined Cardiff University in 2005. Before that, I worked as a Lecturer in German at Plymouth University.
I did my PhD (‘Flooding Fortress Europe’: Metaphor and Visual Rhetoric in Austrian Newspaper Discourses about Asylum Seekers) at Bradford University, and before that I completed a PGCE in secondary education and an MEd in Education and the Media.
I am originally from Vienna, where I studied Media and Journalism, and worked for several newspapers and news agencies. This inspired some of my earliest research projects, including on Austrian press politics in the interwar period (1936-1938), media representations of the controversial contemporary Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, and (for my PhD) verbal and visual metaphors in Austrian press reports about asylum seekers.
Supervisions
I am interested in supervising PhD students in the areas of:
- Comics and graphic novels (including part-creative projects)
- Visual and multimodal metaphor
- Political cartoons
- Health communication
- Visual and multimodal communication in any context/medium/genre
I am currently supervising two PhD students:
- Co-Supervisor for Jonathan Macho: ‘Another World, This World’: Stylistically Remediating Comics into Prose
- Co-Supervisor for Christeena Anto: Examining Gender Constructions in Japan through Heisei and Reiwa Era Manga Targeted at Boys (Shōnen) and Girls (Shōjo)
