Explainer Animation for Social Justice and Community Education
Finding ways to make complex subjects understandable and relatable, especially where nuance and empathy-building are required, is a challenge for anyone seeking to build a more equitable and inclusive society. Thankfully, animation is a powerful tool for engaging curiosity and building the kind of emotional resonance required to sustain interest through challenging subject matter!
Case studies
Here are some recent collaborations I’ve participated in to explain complex topics, build empathy and awareness.
INFLUENCE POLICY
The attention of policymakers is highly sought after which means summaries – quick but empathic understandings that they can then use to ground and justify decisive action – are necessary for change. Animations can convey both nuanced information and powerful emotion in memorable and impactful ways.
Drive Change
Change only happens when a groundswell of support makes it necessary. And humans cannot act on knowledge they do not possess. Most of our social ills function at the level of common sense. To bring the nuanced understanding that drives change, we must capture and hold attention, and then harness it for loving action. Animation is brilliant at this.
ACCESS & ENGAGEMENT
By breaking down complex social or political concepts into simple visual representations, animations can help to increase public understanding of invisible forces that drive social interaction. This can be especially useful for communicating social theory to people who may not have a background in academia, and also can give your work a longer life as a tool in educational settings.
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT IN RESEARCH
One of the more interesting uses of animation is in explaining how research is done to those whose experience lies outside academia. Explaining how a placebo study works in simple terms, or what the term double-blind means — explaining how a study reaches ethics approval before it reaches a participant. Using animation to explain the risks and benefits of participation in a research study can help encourage people to feel safe enough to participate or collaborate with researchers.
Promote diversity, equality & inclusion
Animation is a symbolic tool, and it is as expansive as the human mind can make it. There is room for everything and everyone in animation. When designing your explainer animation, we can work together to ensure that your research is presented in ways that encompass and promote the ethics of diversity and inclusion. Creating the world as we’d like it to be will draw in the attention of the people we want to build that world with.
collaboration & representation
Animation can incorporate not just the thoughts and experiences of research participants, but their own hands, artwork, voices and ideas. Animation lends itself to iteration, giving ample opportunity for feedback and revision that incorporate participants ideas and offer them agency in their representation. And participants can even take part in the animation process themselves by creating artwork or attending animation workshops.
