Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Meet an Abolitionist: Dan Archer

Dan Archer is a comics journalist, educator and animator from the UK. He was awarded the John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists at Stanford University. Recently, he implemented a an investigative journalism project, for which he has successfully raised funds, to gather stories and illustrate reportage to cover human trafficking in Nepal's brick. His work is then to be published both in English and Neapli (and possibly Hindi) as an interactive ebook and graphic novel. He will also be offering workshops that give participants the means to tell their own stories in comics form.

So, why comics? In the video on his Kickstarter page, Archer shares that the comic format gives the victims an opportunity to speak to their own community by concealing identity while still speaking powerfully through their visual representations. Archer says about sketching:
Not only does sketching  in the field create a more personal, universal connection with my subjects, as opposed to thrusting recording equipment in their faces, but publishing social justice stories in visual format has proven to raise far more awareness and enjoy more popularity among a younger, hard to reach demographic of readers.
As you might have figured by now, this is not Archer's first project. Here you can see a comic he produced to tell true stories of survivors of human trafficking, as told by Cindy Liou, a staff attorney at Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach Center in San Francisco. In the spring of 2012, he also illustrated a woman's experience with trafficking and rescue after the San Francisco Public Press published a special report on human trafficking in the Bay Area which "examined the financial and political challenges facing agencies that aid trafficking victims and prosecute perpetrators."

Click on the image below to see the full-page version.


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