Research
Grassroots Comics in India: Activism through Diffusion of Innovations
Authors:
Randy Duncan ,
Henderson State University, USA, US
Matthew J. Smith
Radford University, USA, US
Abstract
World Comics India (WCI) is an innovative movement in India that is empowering people with few resources to create and disseminate grassroots comics that address the concerns of one village or even a particular neighborhood. World Comics India trains local activists to create simple, usually single-page, comics, and in turn, these activists recruit people from the community and teach them to make such comics. The diffusion of innovations theory, developed by Everett Rogers, is used to determine whether grassroots comics possess the factors that make an innovation successful, and how the WCI strategy progresses through the five phases of adopting an innovation. Grassroots comics seem to be ideally suited for giving voice to the marginalized and advocating solutions to local problems because they are an innovation that is easy to understand, simple enough to be experimented with, learned in a short period of time, and quickly sharable.
How to Cite:
Duncan, R. and Smith, M.J., 2021. Grassroots Comics in India: Activism through Diffusion of Innovations. New Area Studies, 2(1), pp.115–138. DOI: http://doi.org/10.37975/NAS.40
Published on
12 Nov 2021.
Peer Reviewed
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