Facilitated by a community of academics, health carers, authors and artists, the site is a rich resource that provides multiple forms of engagement for different audiences—from people engaged in popularising the role comics can play in medicine to medical practitioners, patients and carers.

Dr Ian Williams, who coined the term ‘Graphic Medicine’ and founded the website, writes on the site, “Thanks in part to the medical humanities movement many medical schools will now have tutors suggesting students read classic literature or modern novels to gain insight into the human condition. I think it is high time that graphic fiction was taken as seriously: comics and graphic novels could be used as a resource for health professionals, playing a valuable role in:
• Reflecting or changing cultural perceptions of medicine
• Relating the subjective patient/carer/provider experience
• Enabling discussion of difficult subjects
• Helping other sufferers or carers”

From Iggy and The Inhalers, by Alex Thomas, MD, to teach kids with asthma about asthma symptoms, treatment and medication.

This isn’t to say that Graphic Medicine only resonates with those somehow connected to the medical field or comic books. Amongst the diverse comics featured or reviewed, there is a loose unification under medical and healthcare themes, making them mostly accessible for anyone to read. They deal with a range of issues, such as coping with a family member’s diagnosis of an illness, postpartum depression and the experience of donating an organ.

Left: Epileptic by David Beauchard. Right: Wrinkles by Paco Roca, a graphic novel about Alzheimer’s disease.

Reading about the project is interesting, but you’re instilled with a much stronger conviction for the case of comics in medicine by actually reading some of them. The narratives expectedly deal with difficult and harrowing themes. They draw you in and give you a greater understanding of and insight into a situation. And while there still exists a fallacy of comic books needing to be ‘comical’ (or dealing with lighter topics), in actual fact their power lies in leveraging image and text deftly to communicate to a wide audience. Graphic Medicine as a platform provides the space needed to explore the role of comics within healthcare.

Some of the comics can be read online. Look Straight Ahead by Elaine Will is about a teenager dealing with depression and bipolar disorder.

From Chapter 4 of Look Straight Ahead by Elaine Will.

Mom’s Cancer , published online twice a week, is written by Brian Fies, and is an account of his mother’s battle with metastatic lung cancer.

Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies.

The resources available on the site are varied and allow you explore different facets of Graphic Medicine.

Comic Reviews and Editor’s Picks point you to different comics. A Graphic Medicine podcast is available through iTunes. You can submit a comic or become a guest author on the site, which helps adding new voices to the discussion. The Facebook page is active and frequently updated with news. Annually, Graphic Medicine also hosts a ‘Comics and Medicine’ conference—this year, the theme for the conference is Spaces of Care, and will be hosted from 16 – 18 July 2015 at the University of California, Riverside.

Poster for the upcoming conference on Comics and Medicine, themed Spaces of Care

External links and resources on the site encourage you to explore medical humanities, artists and authors, and other comic sites further

An eponymously titled book series, published by Penn State Press is available for purchase online. Currently, there are 2 books in the series, The Bad Doctor and The Graphic Medicine Manifesto.

The two books within the series on Graphic Medicine: The Bad Doctor (left) and the Graphic Medicine Manifesto (right).

From the website:
“Curated by an editorial collective with scholarly, creative, and clinical expertise, the series is inspired by a growing awareness of the value of comics as an important resource for communicating about a range of issues broadly termed “medical.” For medical practitioners, patients, and families and caregivers dealing with illness and disability, graphic narrative enlightens complicated or difficult experiences. For scholars in literary, cultural, and comics studies, the genre articulates a complex and powerful analysis of illness, medicine, and disability and a rethinking of the boundaries of “health.” The series will be diverse in its approach. It will include monographic studies and edited collections from scholars, practitioners, and medical educators, as well as original comics from artists and non-artists alike, such as self-reflective “graphic pathographies” or comics used in medical training and education, providing a creative way to learn and teach.”

By using visuals, comics have the ability to directly immerse a reader in a specific context. Effectively harnessing visuals enable readers to develop a rich and layered comprehension of narratives, rapidly increasing the ability to connect with the scenario. The effectiveness of comics also lies in the ability of visuals to have a high recall value.

All images from Graphic Medicine / respective authors and artists, as indicated.

Thoughtshop Foundation is a Social Communication Organisation. It is dedicated to creating new and effective ways of dealing with social issues, with the aim to educate, motivate and initiate change. Thoughtshop Foundation is headed by Himalini Varma and Satayan Sengupta.

Children discuss cards from a Thoughtshop Toolkit.

How does one ‘teach’ a nine year old who has already survived some of life’s harshest lessons?
How does one take sessions on sex education in a village community with young girls who have never been to school?
How does one train non-literate women in business management skills, or talk about ending domestic violence with groups of men and women who believe it’s a normal way of life?

These are just some of the questions we have had to ask ourselves, and our journey to find answers have spanned two decades of work with grass-root communities, across different corners of India and several other developing countries. The discoveries along the way have helped us build a philosophy and understand the nature of communications in a context where the written word is not recognised, and the issues to be raised are often considered taboo.

At its simplest, Communication Design for the social sector can be intended to provide information, or raise awareness. Sometimes, it aims to create behavioural change. But the real magic happens when communication design sparks off a dialogue that leads to a process of self reflection, empowerment and transformation, for an individual and a society.

Communicating rice cultivation, from seed to crop, in Jharkhand.

Lessons from Street Kids
One of our first experiences with working children on the streets of Delhi taught us that the communication process had to be learner centred – a ‘partnership’ – we had as much to learn from the children as we had to offer them. For these children (shoe shine boys, coolies and rag pickers), the street was their classroom, and life on the street was their living school; teaching them harsh, new lessons everyday. At the age of nine and ten years, they led independent adult lives and had already seen a great deal. They would not attend a mainstream school and they were not interested in alphabet books talking of apples and balls. Sessions would take place on the pavements, and children would rush off the moment they saw a potential customer who needed his shoes polished.

Life on the street had made them hide away their vulnerabilities and we needed ways to build trust and get beneath the hardened exterior, find the little child inside. We needed to find a way to excite and connect with the children; help them share their personal stories, learn from them and move ahead. The idea was to appear like a magician before the kids with a bag full of tricks to capture their hearts and minds. After spending many weeks with the children, we developed a kit of games for them. One of the tools, for example, was a set of 36 brightly coloured picture cards; a series of images that captured different moments, emotions, choices and milestones in the children’s’ life.

When asked direct questions about their life, children would withdraw. Yet when playing with the picture cards they would open up. They would pick out cards with situations that they had experienced, and the stories they wove around them were real experiences. This would form an important foundation for further interactions with them. The cards would also serve as a tool to help the children express their feelings, and aspirations. Many cards were open – ended and could be interpreted in different ways.

One card for example had a picture of a boy sitting, looking thoughtful, and a little sad. ‘This boy is sad because he has just lost his shoeshine box and he is wondering what to do now. Since someone stole his box, should he steal someone else’s?’ Asked one. Another kid pulled out a card of a policeman hauling up a child: ‘If he steals a shoe box, then this is what will happen, and he will still be unhappy’. Another child pitched in: ‘I think the boy is sad because he is new and has no friends’, to which the other children agreed and shared how vulnerable a child feels when he is new and alone in the big city. And so, cards helped us learn about what was going on in the children’s minds. Actions and their consequences, social problems relevant to the children’s lives could now be addressed.

During the weeks we spent with the children we discovered that many of them were crazy about Bollywood films. They collected and traded pictures of famous stars. Inspired by this we developed a set of playing cards teaching the alphabet using film stars and famous personalities. So instead of learning A for Apple the children would learn A is for Amitabh (Bachhan)…

Family Spacing Board Game. Part of the Shankar Kit which addresses adolescent boys and young men.

Taboo!
It was 1996. We were travelling to a village group in South 24 Paragnas, West Bengal accompanied by Banidi, an elderly health worker with 21 years experience of working with communities. She complained to us about her latest predicament. She had been instructed to take sessions on reproductive health with girls – adolescents – young enough to be her granddaughters. She fished out a crumpled sheet of paper from a tin trunk, on which was typed a list of topics that she was expected to educate the girls on: Puberty, Menstruation, Conception, Sex Determination, Family Planning. She admitted to us that she had somehow never got around to discussing these issues with girls; it never felt like the right time she said. When we nodded in empathy, she confided how she felt this new requirement was quite unnecessary. She had always gone beyond the call of duty, but said she also had her self respect to consider. ‘What would the village elders think? Talking about sex to teenaged girls in a village’!!

Soon the young girls poured into the room, some looked as young as 12 years old, others may have been as old as 16. Most of these girls cannot read. They have never been to school or have dropped out so long ago that they remembered nothing. ‘How will they ever understand all this technical reproductive health stuff’! Banidi muttered to us under her breath. Later, when we asked the girls if they knew about how their body worked – about body systems – they looked completely blank. One of the girls mentioned that periodically a doctor visited their village and would give a lecture on such things. But they never really understood what she said and were too scared to ask. Marriage, children and motherhood, however, were round the corner; a reality that most of these girls would face most likely before their 18th birthday.

The Champa kit, a teaching aid for health workers disseminating information on reproductive health to rural adolescent girls.

The year long interactive development process resulted in the creation of a graded 5 module educational package of stories, games and models to discuss reproductive health with adolescent girls. Through the story of 12 year old Champa and her friends, different issues around reproductive health were raised. These stories were illustrated using lucid water colour paintings that were widely understood, and allowed the girls to let their imaginations flow. To break the ice and bridge the facilitator-learner divide, a card game showing social situations was introduced where the girls played as teams and challenged, argued and convinced each other on how different social situations influenced their lives. Games and models were developed to reduce the inhibitions around biological concepts of menstruation, conception, sex determination and the use of contraceptives. Games and activities were also devised to build life skills like assertiveness and negotiation.

Illustration from Champa’s discovery, Why does menstruation happen?, a flipchart from the Champa Kit.

Over the last 19 years the kit has been adapted in various languages and used by peer educators across the country to discuss reproductive health in a way that was non-threatening and fun! The interactive process enabled barefoot facilitators or peer educators (marginalised girls from the community) to replace resource persons as they started conducting free and open sessions to discuss sensitive issues. Young girls could freely share their questions with these didis who were most often just like them.

Now multiply that by a Million!
In 2006 we were lucky to be involved in a South Asia wide campaign to end violence against women. It was an ambitious campaign reaching out to 5 million individuals over 6 years and across 6 countries inspiring them to become change makers. Our role involved creating campaign communication, and youth change-makers in West Bengal.

The audience was diverse in every way. In India alone there were 13 states using over 8 languages. The campaign communication was driven by a set of guiding principles: Communication would be positive and inspiring, encourage personal change, be non- judgmental and challenge stereotypes, enable dialogue and be rights- based. And of course they would have to be pictorial and interactive. Through an intense process that covered several years, many participatory workshops and lots of help from partner organisations, we worked to develop a common pictorial language around the issue of gender and violence against women. This new language would have to cut across region, class, age and language barriers, not only within India, but across the campaign countries.

Character illustrations from the Understanding Gender and Violence against Women Toolkit.

One of the thumb rules of creating an image was this – the viewer must be able to imagine himself or herself as being the character in the image. This simple but very effective technique helped us maintain the dignity of characters, and therefore connect with men and women. It was interesting to hear people point out to images and say ‘I feel I am that man. I used to abuse my wife. I never thought it hurt her. I feel it now, I need to make a change’. The focus was on change – encouraging every individual to commit to even a small change; to believe that small efforts lead to big changes. There was also a continuous effort to find techniques that would challenge people’s beliefs, make them rethink attitudes that had been accepted without question for generations.

Here’s an example of an activity that elicited an interesting and familiar pattern of responses:
We would first show an image, of a woman doing the cooking and managing kids and her husband relaxing in the background, smoking a cigarette. People would respond casually saying that this is normal, this is how it is, how it has always been. Then we would show the same picture with the man doing the cooking and managing kids, while the wife is shown relaxing in the background smoking. At this, people would get startled. They would laugh nervously. “There must be some mistake. This is absurd…What a selfish woman!” And thus a raging discussion would begin.

New images and new scenarios were created to help people envision new realities where men shared housework, where women participated in decision- making. Many years later when an intensive impact assessment process was conducted and people were asked what they recalled, they would share powerful personal changes they have made in their life. They would often refer to the workshops as a series of images, which brought home to us the power of images to infuse into people’s consciousness.

One woman recalled the images of a woman eating less, being married early – ‘Those felt like pictures from my life…I wondered how the facilitators knew…Till then it never occurred to me this could change’!
At another interview, a father regretted that he had made a terrible mistake by forcing his under-age daughter to marry against her will. He would not repeat the same mistake with his younger girl. She would have the same freedom as Meenu, one of the characters in the communications.

The We Can Campaign to End Violence Against Women, with its focus on personal change and positive approach has now spread to 15 countries across the world, though the guiding principles remain the same. We have been privileged to work with teams from these other regions, to help them adapt the campaign strategy to their contexts.

Take-home picture and activity booklet for the participants of the My Childhood My Rights workshops.

Communication is Community Building
In our journey over these last two decades, our work has expanded to cover a wide range of issues: from self-exploration, exploring multiple identities, to child rights, water and sanitation, to poor women’s economic leadership and strategies for emergency relief. The solutions range from games and models to films, audio tools and multimedia. Training of trainers, especially grass-root facilitators or peer educators are integral processes. More recently our work could be better described as programme design: Creating sustainable, replicable models for development. Over the last few years, on our own initiative we have been creating community based youth leaders who do a journey from self to society, build youth groups and initiate positive social change within their communities.

It has been an amazing ride, as we have discovered the synergy between development communications and community building. Effective communication improves the quality of life and relationships between people. It increases empathy, reduces judgment and the barriers of misunderstanding that separate us from each other.

More information and materials for use are available at Thoughtshop Foundation’s website, facebook page and on twitter.

All images courtesy Thoughtshop Foundation

Lakshmi Murthy, founder of Vikalp Design, has been working with the rural population in Rajasthan & Gujarat for over 20 years as a communication designer, to develop an effective framework for communication. And in doing so, she has uncovered a way of seeing, and consequently a new way of conversing with her audiences. Below is a short excerpt from an interview with her in Dekho—Conversations on Design in India.

“In distinguishing between the urban and the rural audience, the latter is wrongfully regarded as visually illiterate. The rural audience has a sharper perception of their environment and are keener to infer from indexical traces that the urban individual would neglect. In fact it is the city-bred individual who may be ‘illiterate’ in the rural environment, lacking their visual knowledge. While an urban designer will draw in proportion and orientation of what they see as ‘known’, a villager would rely on vernacular knowledge to draw, displaying a keen unlettered intelligence.

Urban designers need to re-examine their role in communication when working with non-literate and rural groups. They need to assume the role of a facilitator and act as a catalyst in encouraging people’s own visual expression, finding a common visual language and producing visuals that are responsive to the needs of the audience.

A participatory process of self-expression holds one answer. Encouraging people to draw has been looked upon as an empowering process that leads to inclusion of notions otherwise difficult to express.”

Image from Vikalp’s Rural Pictorial Gallery. Drawn by people in rural areas of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal and Madhya Pradesh, and collected by Vikalp since 1992.

In the above excerpt, Lakshmi puts forth a new role of the communication designer when working in a new social and cultural environment. She proposes a shift, from creator to a facilitator—wherein the process of design seeks to leverage existing knowledge and language—gently questioning and guiding and eventually co-creating a solution. The process brings one of the key principles of design—empathy into action, and goes beyond merely sensitising a designer to enabling him/her with the building blocks of a design intervention. The other key benefit of this process can be the emergence of a natural ownership. World-over, well meaning design interventions often break down with users/communities not being able to sustain a connection with it (design intervention). But this new way of building together, breaks down barriers and roots the foundation of an idea in the user community.

Image from Vikalp’s Rural Pictorial Gallery.

Learn more about Vikalp and their work, here.

Dekho image, courtesy Codesign.  Illustrations courtesy Vikalp.

The Taboo writen by Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal.

The book was released in 2012 and features 47 contributors who collaborated to produce 28 stories with the partition as a common theme. The contributors—with backgrounds as journalists, illustrators, filmmakers, artists, designers and writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—voiced narratives of fiction, poetry, reportage, comics and family histories.

The Old Fable is a collaboration between Tabish Khair and Priya Kuriyan.

A spread from The Old Fable.

At a TED talk in 2009, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of the danger of a single story and its ability to misrepresent people and cultures by reinforcing only one idea. The talk essentially encourages you to continuously seek different perspectives in order to develop a better understanding of the nuances of a complex, layered idea. Retelling and revisiting the partition opens up how we, in this day and age, with almost no first-hand connection, can start to understand it. I find that this is the most striking aspect of This Side That Side; as a compendium of stories, it manages to communicate the complexity of the partition—not through academic understanding—but by giving space and life to multiple voices and stories.

A spread from the spread I Too Have Seen Lahore! by Salman Rashid and Mohit Suneja.

The book was compiled by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, an Indian graphic novelist and artist based in Delhi, and published by Yoda Press and Goethe Institut, Delhi. Contributors were invited to collaborate on the project through an open call in 2011. At times, the partition serves as a backdrop to people’s lives, and at other times it is the main focus of the story. In the story ‘The Old Fable’, written by Tabish Khair and illustrated by Priya Kuriyan, the division of India is parodied through a metaphor. The story ‘I Too Have Seen Lahore’, worded by Salman Rashid and illustrated by Mohit Suneja, is an account of Darshan Singh, born in Pakistan, who has to leave his home because of “a new line drawn by history across the heart of an ancient land”.

The short stories are snippets that inform, entertain, amuse, and educate. They force you to look at the partition through different lenses and often with personal, anecdotal connections in real-life contexts, not isolated in a history textbook. The stories deal with questions of identity and home and lead us to explore the idea of the ‘other side’.The experimental and novel format itself engages readers to approach the book without preconceived notions—allowing for a deeper exploration of our history.

Orijit Sen’s ‘Making Faces’ allows readers to explore ‘Nationality, Ethnicity, Gender, Race and other Indisciplines in South Asia.’

“This astonishing collection of talent from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh focuses on the lasting effects of partition and dwells on the human yearning for something other than what history and its makers dictate. Beautiful, moving and unforgettable.”—Joe Sacco

One of the critical areas of reform in the legal system, is the awareness of rights and laws by the general populace. While there are laws and systems in place, the average citizen is often unaware of their presence, their relevance and when/how to access them. Recognising this as a key failing, lawyers Kanan and Kelly Dhru from Research Foundation for Governance in India (RFGI), embarked on their idea of creating a graphic story format to educate children about laws in India. Lawtoons is a comic book series on laws in India, and following a successful crowd-funding campaign the first book in the series is now out.

“The useful information about citizenship, democracy, laws and rights that children learn in their schools through the civics curriculum is often passed off as ‘dull and boring’. Even upon growing up, an individual is likely to be intimidated by the bulky law books full of legal jargons. This unfortunately, results in a society where most people find it difficult to relate to the idea of laws and legal systems, and feel disconnected.”
—From the Lawtoons website

The first Lawtoons prototype book was designed and tested with children in two public and three private schools in Ahmedabad. Apart from Kanan and Kelly Dhru, creative inputs on the project have been so far provided by designer & illustrator Anish Daolagupu and mentors like Margie Sastry (writer and former associate editor at Amar Chitra Katha) and Sekhar Mukherjee (head of animation film design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad). With their recent funding, Lawtoons hopes to engage more designers and create subsequent books under the series.

You can buy the first Lawtoons book, called ‘A Song for Everyone’ on Right to Equality & Freedom of Speech, here.

Images courtesy, Lawtoons.

Left: The poster, made by Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Manch, West Bengal, speaks out against acid attacks on women. It focuses on a read incident of an attack on a 14-year old.
Right: A general poster on violence against women. Drawn by Golak and designed by Bindia Thapar, the poster was created by the Lawyers Collective, Delhi with support from UNIFEM.

Recognising the value of a poster as a tool for communication and mobilisation, and challenged with a lack of documentation of ephemera and grey literature created by these activist groups, Zubaan sought to research, locate and publicly archive as many of these posters, brochures, leaflets as possible. According to them, “the idea was to look at how the women’s movement and its concerns could be mapped visually, to ask what the history of the movement would look like through its posters and visual images.”

Left: An anti-dowry poster by the National Commission for Women, Government of India.
Right: A collage of posters against violence, created by Natya Chetana, Orissa. Each of the posters is a separate poster, covering issues from rape, police brutality, sati etc.

The initial phase of the project culminated in a travelling exhibition and a catalogue, with the original posters housed by Sound and Picture Archives for Women (SPARROW) in Mumbai, and their digital scans accessible online. Our Pictures, Our Words—a book pictorially charting the diverse and complex course of the women’s movement was produced. The posters in the book are organised according to pertinent categories such as violence and health-related issues, and as much information as available about the poster is provided, pieced together with short essays, introductions and historical backdrops.

Images from Zubaan’s Poster Women project.

Oodles of Doodles

The first book created by Art for Heart was Oodles of Doodles in 2002, which was made for children above the age of 6, dealing with illness and life in hospitals. It develops in them the skill to give voice to their fears, provides them with a sense of control and a safe avenue for expression. Authored by Steffanie Lorig (Executive Director of Art with Heart), Oodles of Doodles incorporates the work of 97 illustrators and over 20,000 copies of the book were distributed in three years.

Draw It Out

Their latest interactive book, Draw It Out, supports children who are affected by overwhelming feelings of grief or loss due to the death of a loved one or of a classmate, broken family situations, or serious illness. It was developed with the inputs of 27 experts in the fields of counselling, social work and art therapy amongst other fields. The book is meant to serve as an outlet for complex emotions which can not easily be communicated, which can then be used as a foundation for positive conversations. According to Art with Heart, the book helps children articulate and navigate complex emotions and ask questions they may be afraid to ask, reveal perceptions or misconceptions about their situation, identify their support systems and process loss and increase coping skills.

Proceeds from book sales support outreach to high-risk children and teens. Overwhelming testimonials to the efficacy of the books can be seen as an indication of the commitment to and quality of the work. To view more of their work and causes, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook.

Images courtesy Art with Heart.

Colour Africa Proverbs is a colouring book for children, with illustrated proverbs from African culture, spanning 11 African countries and 10 languages. The proverbs are based on valuable and universal truths like respect, compassion and teamwork, represented through illustrations and illustrated type, and explained at the end of the book in simple actionable terms.  A game in the middle of the book uses the themes of the proverbs in an engaging format. The book is locally produced in South Africa, using recycled paper and minimal packaging.

The book was created by Colour Africa, a division of Design for Development in Cape Town, who describe themselves as, “We are a group of graphic designers who share a passion for people and realising human rights. We want to use our skills, creativity and connections to make a positive impact on people’s lives.” Through their work they support civil society organisations, corporate social responsibility initiatives, individuals and government projects and create impactful visual communication. The Colour Africa Proverbs book emerged as a side project of its members and has gone on to become a well-loved activity book for children. With locally relevant content and meaning, the book provides a comforting learning environment for children, especially in under-resourced schools, creches and trauma centres.

The illustrations and illustrated type is created by Cape Town based illustrator Roulé le Roux, known for her bold, expressive and hand-drawn quality of work. Talking about her work for the book on her website, Roulé says, “I specifically wanted the text to be hand drawn and pictorial, to show young children how closely drawing, writing and reading is linked. To encourage children to get ready to read and explore letter-forms while doing a fun activity. All illustrations in the book are deliberately detailed. In my opinion it is more important for the child to “read” the picture and the words ( if they are old enough) than to ‘colour in the lines’.”

Colour Africa Proverbs is wonderful both on account of the content it delivers and the manner in which the experience is structured. It connects the children with an aspect of their culture which is relevant for life, and the activity-oriented experience fosters a closer engagement across a longer span of time with the content.

You can order copies of the book as single items or in value packs from their website, and also purchase copies for donation to the Earthchild Project, a local education-based organisation.

All images via Colour Africa Proverbs and Design for Development.

A set of 100 illustrated cards (Kartu-Card, Ensiklopedia-Encyclopedia), KartuPedia catalogs notable Inventions, Indonesian Flora & Fauna, World Heritage, Astronomy, and Indonesian National Heroes in five sets of twenty cards, each carrying an illustration of the object, place, or person being represented, accompanied by its name.

Heimlo, a multi-disciplinary design studio in Jakarta have created illustrations that are simple and instantly recognisable, allowing students of different ages to correctly identify the subject, an important consideration, given that the students often have limited access to the internet or libraries. Heimlo has made 10 of these illustrations available as a free download from their blog.

Indonesia Mengajar (Teach Indonesia) is an organisation that sends teachers to remote provinces of Indonesia, to give children access to quality education.The organisation plans to create 13,500 cards that will be sent to 126 schools in rural areas across Indonesia.

The reverse of each card is blank, providing room for the students to capture information about the object, person, or place that it represents. This emphasis on ‘completing’ the cards is the most significant benefit of KartuPedia, and sets it apart from traditional flash cards used in the classroom. Students learn the valuable skill of seeking out, verifying, and compiling information for themselves, which encourages self-initiated learning. This skill, once learned, can enable students to teach themselves beyond the classroom, dramatically increasing their potential for learning.

A search for #KartuPedia on twitter returns dozens of pictures of students proudly showing off their completed cards (such as the images above, from @cittanandini and @KIJawaTimur), a testament to the efficacy, as well as the execution of the project.

Images from Heimlo, unless otherwise mentioned.

Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit is an illustrated account of a young woman’s thoughts and feelings as she comes into contact with the larger world. A semi-auto-biographical tale with art by Mithila artist Amrita Das, and text by Gita Wolf & Susheela Varadarajan (from the Hindi original by Amrita Das), the book was published by Tara Books in April 2014. While a deeply personal account from Amrita’s own life, the book encourages reflections on what it means to make choices, in the face of societal norms.

As a publishing effort, Tara Books has been recognised for its sensitive dealing of social and cultural themes through many of its titles, and also successful collaborations between designers and folk artists creating a uniquely Indian style of illustration and visualisation. Their recent publication “Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit” is a particular poignant narration, where the choice of the Mithila folk art style adds significant meaning to the story.

Mithila painting (also known as Madhubani painting) originates from the Mithila region of Bihar, India and adjoining areas in Nepal. Traditionally practiced by the women within a small community, and initially restricted to religious, mythological themes, the paintings became a canvas for the women to express their feelings and reactions, over time. It is this fact, that makes the choice of art-style an apt vehicle for a story that is about a young girl’s fears, dreams and questions as she ventures out.

In her art for the book, Amrita uses her training at the Mithila Art Institute, to employ different devices of the style to amplify her narrative. The characteristic detail of Mithila art is used to incorporate elements which establish the contemporary physical situation of the story. Repetitive borders, patterns are used to illustrate situations of limitation and societal norms. Graphic compositions in each page bring multiple events and spaces into a unified moment in time, reflecting the contradictions, questions in the author’s mind.

That a traditional or folk art style can be used to establish the ethnic or cultural origin of a story, is but obvious. But the ability to find a resonance with the content of the narrative, and the skill-fullness to reshape established, traditional visual devices, makes work like ‘Hope is a Girl Selling Fruit’ exceptionally rich and relevant for a wider audience.

These are some of the places you can buy the book: Tara Books, Amazon. You can also read a detailed report on the book’s art at Look/Book.

Images, courtesy Tara Books.