50. What can comics such as Heartstopper teach us about ethics? With Simon Meisch Artwork

Ethics Untangled

Ethics Untangled is a series of conversations about the ethical issues that affect all of us, with academics who have spent some time thinking about them. It is brought to you by the IDEA Centre, a specialist unit for teaching, research, training and consultancy in Applied Ethics at the University of Leeds.

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Ethics Untangled

50. What can comics such as Heartstopper teach us about ethics? With Simon Meisch

December 01, 2025 • Jim Baxter

A really interesting conversation with Simon Meisch this week. Simon is a Senior Lecturer for Applied Ethics at the Ethics Centre of the University of Tubingen, and until recently was also a visiting scholar here at IDEA. It's an unusual episode of the podcast in that we aren't talking about a specific ethical issue. Instead, we talk about a particular way of highlighting ethical issues and encouraging discussion of them. That's through engaging with serial narratives, including comic books and TV series. We focused on one particular comic book series, which has been adapted for TV, which is Heartstopper. Aside from enlightening me about that series, Simon makes a convincing case that this is a good way to get at a range of ethical issues, in a way that is complex, subtle and grounded in recognisable situations.

Here's the Heartstopper webcomic.

Here's Simon's webpage.

And here are some other relevant links recommended by Simon:

Ethics Untangled is produced by IDEA, The Ethics Centre at the University of Leeds.

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