Infographics as Advocacy

Advocating through, for and with infographics

Infographics, when done well, can distill data and information in powerfully persuasive ways. Infographics can be meaningful conveyors of data storytelling and have the potential to make big impacts—to inform policymakers, to further social and political causes, to illuminate particular issues, to change behaviours, and more. When advocacy is the goal, infographics can be a strategic format for research dissemination, knowledge creation, and student learning opportunities.

This section discusses the way infographics allow for particular kinds of advocacy while also advocating for the use of infographics as a scholarly method on its own.

“Our focus in our stream is Law and Society, so we've been over a few years developing some community-engaged relationships, that's CEL relationships, with local social justice law firms and local human rights organizations. And we often bring in guest speakers to speak to their work. They speak about movements for police accountability, movements for harm reduction. They speak about Indigenous sovereignty and sort of larger issues of structural injustice and violence. And that's been in place for a number of years. We have issues, or we've sort of had a long-standing question, around how to make those relationships reciprocal, in the sense that we've been trying to find ways that our students could meaningfully engage with the communities that we learn from in a non-extractive way. And so this is actually sort of a long-standing problem in CEL . . . [b]ut essentially we're thinking about what competencies and skills our students can offer communities that they learn with." - Dr. Evan Mauro (“Infographics as Public Scholarship”)

Advocating with infographics


Information activism and advocacy, or "infoadvocacy" and "infoactivism," allow advocates and activists to put information into action. In their most common use, infographics have long been utilized by organizations for information campaigns like 4Humanities' "The Humanities Matter!," the Modern Language Association's infographics on literacy and language learning, or the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice's infographic posters on combating racism. But infoadvocacy also lends itself well to a classroom environment in a variety of ways, particularly as a mode of community engagement and collaboration. In the Infographics as Pedagogy section of this toolkit, you can read about UBC's ASTU 100 class, which works directly with original research and with communities in the Downtown Eastside.


In another classroom scenario, Yearta et al. illustrate how infographics create "multiliterate experiences" for students beyond the traditional essay: "Students no longer write in isolation; they write by communicating, collaborating, creating, and sharing across digital terrains that have made their interaction with texts—and each other—more powerful than ever" (54). By comparing connections from 1930s America in To Kill A Mockingbird to the current Black Lives Matter movement, students were encouraged to examine one theme more fully (like race and education, healthcare, and gender and employment) and develop a well-researched infographic on the topic. Students developed digital and visual literacy skills, collaborative writing practices, and felt more invested in how their writing was received by their audience. The instructor, Megan Schonhar, hopes in the long-term that the process inspires her students to become "more socially active and use infographics as a platform for advocacy" (54).

“My hope is that we can all see the potential for infographics to be used as agents of change and powerful enough to impact a diverse range of audiences . . . Academia is a slow-to-change industry and it can be difficult to advocate for new formats or break the mold of what's been done before. You may find yourself limited by your field practices or your research team's willingness to experiment with these ideas, [but] we can form communities of practice that can serve us and support this system in our work or build one ourselves if we can't find one. Everyone joining us today is proof that there are others interested in these ideas, so using this community to share tips, bounce ideas off of, and collect research and resources to support us as we advocate for research communication can be a huge benefit.” - Dr. Valerie Hruska (“Infographics as Public Scholarship”)

Advocating for infographics


The ubiquity of free and open design tools coupled with the plethora of information available on the internet can make a perfect recipe for misinformation or disinformation. With the number of graphic-oriented social justice campaigns on social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, scholars have an opportunity to utilize a very public medium in a much needed way. Not all infographics will necessarily centre activism, advocacy, or social justice causes, but when that is the goal, they can be powerful tools. Scholars should decide for themselves whether and how to incorporate infoadvocacy into their scholarly practice.

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