Date of Award
Spring 5-20-2022
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Illustration & Visual Culture
Degree Type
Thesis
Abstract
This essay imagines fictional storytelling and urban practices of maintenance, repair, and care as interrelated to one another. They are both practices engaged in building a better world. Urban scholars like Gautam Bhan, Shannon Mattern, and David Harvey propose the city as a space for envisioning the kind of community we want to be—a space for working towards our collective future. By engaging in fictional storytelling, I argue, we are doing the same thing: the dual work of taking from fact and representing it to an audience while also engaging in imagining and world-building. This is also a practice of constructing, repairing, maintaining, and caring. As the essay argues, fictional storytelling draws from traditions of agitprop to imagine new futures. It also makes a case for how creators of comics can learn from urban practices to create spaces to form community and imagine a more just world through their practice.
Language
English
Program Chair
John Hendrix
Recommended Citation
Susarla, Kruttika, "Storytelling for a changing world: Comics as agitprop" (2022). MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture. 2.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mfa_illustration/2