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Illustrating the Geographies of Justice

Joshua Korenblat

SUNY New Paltz

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Sustainability Learning for Action and Community Engagement

OPEN ACCESS BOOK CHAPTER

Illustrating the Geographies of Justice

RELATED CHAPTER
Psithurism: What Musicians and Other Artists Bring to the Climate Justice Movement.

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Collaborative Storytelling for Sustainability and Justice Workshop

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In 2010, a family moved to the small farming town of Kettleman City, California, looking for stability. Soon after, their children developed unexplained nausea and fatigue — and they weren’t alone; other families nearby showed the same troubling symptoms. A hazardous waste landfill sat three miles from town, and pesticide drift from nearby industrial farms filled the air. Instead of staying silent, residents formed their own advocacy group, gathered evidence with outside support, and filed a civil rights complaint with the EPA that eventually led to a federal settlement and commitments to monitor and clean up the area.

That story is at the heart of this workshop because it shows what most sustainability buzzwords actually are once you look closely: people, places, and systems, tangled together. The trouble is that issues like this usually reach us as statistics, policy briefs, or news segments that feel distant and abstract, easy to nod at and move past, or use as mere instruments for existing agendas. This workshop asks a different question: what if we told them the way StoryCorps tells stories? That means with a human voice, a handmade drawing, and enough care to make a stranger’s struggle feel close?

A simple cartoon can do something a photograph can’t: by stripping away incidental detail, it lets a viewer see themselves in someone else’s situation rather than just observing it from a distance. It’s possibly the same reason cartoons travel so easily across cultures and age groups. A rough, slightly wobbly hand-drawn line also signals that this is a work in progress, made by a real person still thinking it through, not a polished verdict handed down from above.

More Student Handmade Videos

What This Workshop Does

Participants turn research into a short illustrated podcast video: a human story, paired with context, told through handmade drawings, recorded narration, and simple animation, and ending with a resource or next step for the audience. Everything is built with tools people already have: PowerPoint or Keynote, maybe Google Slides, and screen-recording software. No animation degree required!

Sustainability, in this framing, is bigger than recycling and clean energy. It’s clean air and safe water, yes, but also food, housing, dignity, public health, and belonging — the conditions people need to live well over time, and the conditions ecosystems need to keep supporting them. The workshop moves in one direction: from facts to story, then to pictures and motion, and finally to public sharing and conversation.

Most people don’t immediately connect social justice to sustainability. They file the two under separate headings, one about fairness and one about the planet. But a community garden without equal access to plots, shared resources, and multilingual signage stops functioning as a community; a clean-energy plan that ignores who bears the construction costs and who gets the electricity isn’t really sustainable either. Social justice is the foundation on which sustainability work stands, and a well-told human story is often the fastest way to make that connection visible.

KNOW, DO, BE

KNOW

Sustainability has ecological, social, economic, cultural, and personal dimensions, and stories are how people understand systems through lived experience. A research report becomes meaningful once it’s translated into a person, a place, a challenge, a system, a response, and a possibility. Participants also learn that a rough sketch is a thinking tool. Cartoons simplify without trivializing, but ethical representation is also vital: images can clarify, or they can stereotype. Good storytelling here represents people with dignity and shows their agency, so they're identified not just by their struggles.

PICTURE ME MORE

I like to use PICTURE ME MORE to recall all the ways pictures can work together with words: Because visuals “picture me more” than text alone.

What's an Idea?

"What is an idea anyway? Well, you can think of it as a pattern of information that helps you understand and navigate the world. Ideas come in all shapes and sizes, from the complex and analytical to the simple and aesthetic." — Chris Anderson

What’s Information?

Information is data that’s been structured so people can derive meaning and knowledge from it. In visual forms, it can be a table, a diagram, a chart, or a map.

The project below does a great job of including information and a story about one Syrian refugee girl. In an accordion-fold book, one side is devoted to her story; the other to information graphics. I like to show this so students can see the difference and the power of information design and visual stories.

Data and Story Exemplar

Historia De Zainab, by Visualizar

In addition to Storycorps, an exemplary project for this workshop is Historia de Zainab, a project about a Syrian refugee girl and the plight of refugees, created by the Spanish design firm Visualizar. It's an accordion book that shows a sketchnote/infographic on one side, and a story on the other. The sketchnote/infographic gives the reader a big picture, abstract idea. The story offers emotional engagement and vivid details. We need both in our visual communications.

What's a Story?

A story is a recounting of events based on emotional experience, told from a perspective.

"Why are stories so important to human life? Because they are made of the same thing
we are: time. Stories are tiny simulations of life itself. They have beginnings, middles, and
ends; and so do we.

As we live our lives, we notice the things that happen, and we think and talk about the
things that could and couldn’t and should and shouldn’t happen. To communicate, connect,
and make sense of the overarching stories that are our lives, we tell and listen to stories,
give and receive stories, and build and play with stories.” —Cynthia Kurtz

DO

Summary

Participants choose a topic or theme they care about, research the people and systems behind it, identify and visualize the 6 W’s below, and write a short story script.

From there, two memorable tools from Sherm Cohen, a storyboard artist, carry the work:

RIBBIT turns the script into a beat board (Read it, Internalize it as a movie, Break it into beats, Identify the key moments, Thumbnail the sequence).

WHACK sharpens the storyboard (What should we show, How should we show it, what Acting or gesture matters, what Camera angle helps, what ‘Kut’ or transition carries meaning). From there: a rough animatic, recorded narration, simple movement, a round of feedback, and a final export.

Six W’s Behind Every Story:

Every group starts here:

  1. Who/what is experiencing this issue?
    Consider: People & Other Animals; the More-Than-Human World
  2. What:
    Is a challenge, creativity, or connection story emerging? What is it? What harm or injustice—a thwarting of a valued aspiration—is being done?
  3. Where does the story happen?
  4. When? How long ago? Does it unfold over days, weeks, months, or years?
  5. How are people organizing, caring, adapting, or resisting? Response from people to injustice.
  6. Why is this happening? What policy, history, structure, patterns of behavior, assumptions, and beliefs shape it?

And finally, the bonus: What future becomes imaginable, feasible, desirable, and impactful?

Run the Kettleman City story through these questions, and it transcends being a simple contamination and pollution case: it becomes a story about place, health, dignity, collective action, and the possibility of repair.

Stories bundle all these ideas together in a lively and engaging way that is much easier to discuss. They help deliver a message, function as a thinking tool, and help us relate and connect. This shift from report to relationship is the whole point because it helps students understand, think, converse, and imagine what’s possible.

Resources

Workshop Flow

1. Choose a generative theme. Participants name an issue from their lives that keeps returning to their attention — food access, environmental racism, climate anxiety, disability justice, housing insecurity, water access, migration, mutual aid, or anything in that territory. The guiding prompt: what issue keeps coming back to you, and why might it matter to others, too?

Generative themes are not imposed by educators but emerge organically from the lived experiences, language, and concerns of the students themselves. Because of this active role of the students, they are not only participants but co-investigators of their own experiences. Through dialogue, reflection, and collective inquiry, certain recurring issues arise – issues that touch upon co-investigators´ realities, struggles, and hopes, and capture a topic of crucial interest for the people involved in the conversation.

2. Research the story. Beyond the basic facts, participants ask who’s affected, who benefits, who bears the cost, and how people are already responding. The goal: gather the facts.

Then give those facts the vividness and coherence of a narrative so students have a little bundle of meaning, a thinking tool, and a story as common ground for discussion and sharing.

3. Write the script. Introduce a person and place, show the challenge, zoom out to the system causing it, show people responding, and raise a question, or a horizon of possibility worth imagining.

Here’s a great way to write a script of 150-300 words, good for a two to three-minute video:

How to Ace a 300-Word Story

Groups read the script aloud before drawing anything. It’s the fastest way to catch confusing lines, pacing problems, and moments that need a picture rather than a sentence

4. Find the beats with RIBBIT. Participants then doodle the six W’s straight from the script: for example, a portrait for any noun, adjective, or verb; a map for any preposition or mention of place or relationship; a timeline for any time sequence. It's all about getting a visual idea of the story, because with only words, we can fool ourselves into thinking we know when we really don't. The best person to learn this technique from is Dan Roam.

How to doodle the 6W’s, from Dan Roam:

Play
Play

Then, students close their eyes and run the story as a short film in their heads. This also helps them play a movie in their mind, which writing expert Peter Elbow recommends. Some Movie of the Mind responses might include Elbow's four response methods:

Pointing: Identify elements that stand out visually

Summarizing: Capture the main visual message

Telling: Describe your experience pre-visualizing the work

Showing: Express subtle reactions to possible visual choices

They break it into six to ten beats and narrow those down to the four that matter most: the world as it is, the challenge, the response, and the possibility. Often, they work well. That’s the spine of the storyboard.

They create a beat board visual plan of rough doodles. To facilitate this process, students learn about storytelling flow using sequential images. Two resources here are Scott McCloud’s transition types (from his book Understanding Comics) and RIBBIT.

Learn More →

🌊 Flow: Scott McCloud's transition types

💚 RIBBIT: Thumbnails to Beat Board

5. Strengthen it with WHACK. What to show, How to show it; Acting, Camera Moves, Kutting (Transitions)

The first job is clarity. The second job is liveliness, variety, and energy:

Begin with a clear visual plan for the script: WHAT to show and WHEN to show it. That’s RIBBIT!

Then, once the plan is validated, focus on HOW to show each panel. That’s WHACK! This is often even more important than what you’re showing. It’s the visual rhetoric that gives ideas stories and wings to fly!

With WHACK, the visual subtext is much more important than the content. For example, a wide shot can make it easier to laugh at a character, while a close-up can convey greater empathy (see Charlie Chaplin’s films for how he uses wide shots for comedy and close-ups for tragedy). A bird’s-eye view reveals a system; a slow zoom draws attention; a fade suggests memory; a cut creates urgency….

Learn More → WHACK

6. Build a rough animatic. Storyboard frames get photographed or scanned into slides with scratch narration and rough timing — just enough to test whether the pacing works and whether people are represented with dignity, before anyone polishes a single drawing.

Craft and polish the art. Rough, hand-drawn art can feel authentic and charming. I even liken it to ‘Trembling Thinking,’ a philosophy by the Caribbean poet Edouard Glissant that suggests that trembling lines carry with them the currents of open-minded possibility.

But sometimes students find looking at rough sketches to be discouraging. I recommend that here, students can leverage the artists in the group to refine the work to a level of craft and polish they can be proud to share.

8. Add simple motion. Animation here just means change over time: as designer Dan Roam notes, it often involves changes in position, scale, and orientation, and the creation and destruction of images as they appear to draw in and get erased. There are also pans and zooms, which enliven still images.

Learn More →

How to Make Motion Graphics Workshop: Keynote & PowerPoint (Basic)

Motion Design: Adobe XD and Figma Tutorials (Advanced)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect (for panning and zooming)

8. Share and reflect. Finished videos can go out to a class, a public event, or a story bank of online videos, like which storytelling researcher Cynthia Kurtz likens to a seed bank that preserves generational cultural knowledge of nutritious food. Sharing is what turns private learning into a public conversation and often raises students' stakes and commitment levels.

BE

Practice becoming a curious listener, an ethical storyteller, a systems thinker, and a hopeful realist: staying open to complexity rather than rushing toward certainty that predefined identities and buzzwords uphold. A trembling, imperfect line in a sketch is part of the process. It shows the work is still alive and still open to revision!

SELF-REFLECTION: INVITATION FOR EDUCATORS:

Closing Thoughts

Research gathers facts; scripts turn facts into coherent stories.

RIBBIT makes the story plan visible; WHACK gives it liveliness, variety, and energy. An animatic tests whether it actually works, and standard presentation software like Keynote or PowerPoint enables the motion that creates an illusion of a fully animated experience. None of it is really about the software, though. It’s about treating sustainability as a way of noticing the relationships, responsibilities, and people behind what might otherwise have been a distant or divisive topic, and as a way of imagining, via story-sharing, what the search for fairness, resilience, adaptation, and repair could look like in our communities.