People, Place and Voice 1 Communications, Civics, Industry – ANZCA2007 Conference Proceedings Place, People and Voice: Creating and Communicating Expressive Content via Cartoons Frank Sligo, Elspeth Tilley, Niki Culligan, Margie Comrie and Franco Vaccarino Department of Communication and Journalism, Massey University Abstract Following one to one interviews with 90 participants in adult literacy training courses we sought ways to provide quality research feedback both to them and to governmental adult literacy policy makers and funders in ways other than in written reports. Pictorial images were designed comprising a combination of place (photographs of the research site Wanganui), people (depictions of our interviewees following actual participant demographics) and voice (interviewees’ words selected from interview transcripts. To date little detailed attention seems to have been paid to the mechanisms of just how expressive content in media of this nature is manufactured or communicated. We explore how expressive content is produced by a cluster of factors including the appealing expression on or form of the person’s face, the words used, and an evocation of community values to be inferred from the person’s words. We go on to explore how the images that we depict are an attempt to construct voice and person as strong individuals who are striving to better themselves. As such we undertake a particular construction of people of low literacy in community and accept that our communicative intent is political in nature.