The Politics of Persuasion versus the Construction of Alternative Communities: Zines in the Writing Classroom

We discuss how studying and creating zines in our composition classes allows our students to negotiate and explore the complexities of writing without the compulsions of many of the politically problematic commonplaces of composition pedagogy. We use zines to examine the unique ways in which their rhetorical devices address conflicts around questions of audience and diversity, as well as the particular questions that the zines raise about the politics of persuasion, our own writing practices, writing strategies that the zines suggest to us, and the construction of alternative communities

Zines as Critical Praxis: Collapsing Discourse Around Who Owns Knowledge, and What It Means to be an Author

Zines are low-budget, DIY (do it yourself) texts that are produced beyond mainstream publishing channels. The central premise of zines is that all readers are authors; most zines are motivated by a desire to share information rather than make a profit. Collecting zines and creating zine-related library programming allows librarians to coordinate with the campus community to establish zine-making as a valuable tool in campus discourse. Zine-making collapses barriers among and between learners and teachers, and the use of digital and analog skills. Zines are hands-on, offline, and intimate artifacts in a time when much of our scholarship and discourse is being routed through increasingly and sometimes exclusively digital pathways. This presentation will explore the unique benefits of co-creating zines with readers and authors to extend scholarly and campus conversations that address students’ whole selves. The SUNY New Paltz Zine Library has spent the last two years exploring these issues, both in the classroom setting alongside faculty, and outside of it by working directly with students and campus community members to create zines. Faculty collaborations include zine history lectures and workshops in the women, gender, and sexuality studies department, and workshops with fine arts and english composition classes. Outside of the classroom, we have collaborated with students, faculty, and staff to create zines about self-care, a zine to process reactions to the 2016 elections results, and an internal library zine for which fifty-six library staff members created pages introducing themselves and answering questions about their experiences working at the library. The creation, and the provision of access to zines in college and research library environments is a practice of critical engagement with issues around authorship and authority in academic environments. This presentation address theoretical, practical, and affective pedagogies of zine-making. Participants will leave prepared to start zine-related programming

Queering archives : the practices of zines

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.This thesis is a consideration of zines and zine practices, and their impact on how we understand archives. I argue that to define zines we need to look past the materiality of the publication, and consider a broader set of practices. Considering zines as practices enables different, and not necessarily linear, approaches to archives. I demonstrate that zines have a queer sensibility, and this ‘zine’ sensibility can disrupt linear repro-time and space (per Halberstam) and ways of making archives. This thesis asks ‘what impact do zine practices have on how archives are understood and imagined?’ and addresses this question through the consideration of a series of spatial and temporal examples. These examples include formal collecting institutions, bedrooms, do-it-yourself archives in social centres and cafes, scholarly publications and zine anthologies. A secondary point of investigation asks ‘how do specific sites of non-normative research such as zines inform research practice, and what form can this research take?’ This question is addressed by employing a queer approach to methodology motivated by zine practices; I use scavenger techniques to build a body of knowledge that includes narratives, interviews, zines, gossip and academic texts. To queer archives disrupts normalised understandings of memory and histories, challenging assumed temporalities and reimagining the fixed space of ‘the archive’. Zines and zine practices unsettle assumptions of archival spaces, and through this archives can be reimagined as generative and productive sites of practice and knowledge, rather than static sites of fact and record

The Librarian’s Guide to Zines for Classroom and Community

Zines continue to benefit from a resurgent interest from their 1990s heyday, including in libraries. A zine can serve as a pedagogical tool and are a low-cost addition to collections and programming in libraries. Over the course of the last three semesters, UNO librarians have collaborated with faculty on zine creation as a creative alternative to a typical research paper project for a course. Creating zines as assignments presents students with the opportunity to demonstrate research skills, exercise creativity, express compassion and empathy, and other outcomes. These outcomes have been illustrated by the classes that have created zines and presented their research on topics such as the environment, self-care, and social justice from the disciplines of Sociology, Psychology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and others. The zine projects have also provided opportunities to establish and strengthen relationships with undergraduate students and faculty to discuss research topics relating to other classes. Librarians created new collaborations with faculty who had previously not used library instruction in their courses, allowing students to gain familiarity with databases and secondary source research. Outside of the classroom, practicum students, interns, and fellows in UNO Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections department have participated in experiential learning projects that used zines to promote library collections and services. The UNO Libraries also collects and supports the creation of zines, as part of our efforts to democratize the archives as well as support local makers and artists from the community. This presentation will introduce an overview of zines, the pedagogical uses of students authoring zines, avenues for outreach and advocacy, and outcomes

In the ruins of zine pedagogy: a narrative study of teaching with zines

This study considers the educational significance of zines—small circulation, self-published magazines—by asking how educators who teach with zines encounter and negotiate zine pedagogy. Though the literature on zines and teaching describes many potential benefits, it also describes contradictions and failures, with some researchers even going so far as to claim that “zines do not belong in classrooms” (Guzzetti, Elliott, & Welsch, 2010, p. 71). Through this dissertation, I investigate and complicate these claims by examining the stories and perspectives of teacher/zinesters—educators who teach or have taught with zines in a classroom setting. The project is situated within theories of the public sphere, scholarship on teaching public writing, and existing work on zine pedagogy. Adopting a narrative research design, I collected data in the form of written and telephone interviews with seven teacher/zinesters, their class materials related to zine pedagogy, their own zines, and other documents and media in which they discuss zines or zine pedagogy. I also examined narratives about zines and their history from books, films, articles, and websites published by members of the zine community. My analysis involved coding the teacher/zinester narratives to develop categories and themes, which I triangulated with supporting data. I found that these teacher/zinesters encounter and negotiate zine pedagogy as an act of making space, publishing, and engaging in conversation. The teacher/zinesters describe zine pedagogy as promising to create space that may not otherwise be available in school, but must contend with the constraints that school imposes on the “radical” space of zines. Multiple promises of zine pedagogy as publishing were identified by the teacher/zinesters, including publishing as a stage in the writing process, as the creation of a physical product, and as sharing. The teachers/zinester narratives also reflected a view of zine pedagogy as conversation, promising to provide students with a model of writing as conversation, as well as to pull them into conversation through saying “yes” and saying “no.” I interpreted these themes through public sphere theory and the feminist poststructural strategy of the figuration: in this case, a narrative of promise, failure, and ruins

DIY Print Activism in Digital Age: Zines in Hong Kong's Social Movements

Hong Kong has experienced two of its largest social movements in history in recent years: the Umbrella Movement in 2014 and the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in 2019, in which many artists and activists used zines as a means to participate. This article aims to explain the popularity of political zines in Hong Kong and the unique functions of zines in the digital age by interviewing zinesters, distributors, and collectors. In this article, a zine is broadly defined as an independent, not-for-profit, Do-it-Yourself form of paper publication. This article argues that unlike mainstream print media, zine production is benefited from digital transformation which can further simplify the means of production and expand distribution network. Also, this article argues that digitization and DIY culture democratize the means of publishing and Hong Kong’s protest zines are the by-product of both forces. Zines have become a democratic object with passion and affection, presenting an alternative account of everyday life

Feminist Zines: (Pre)Occupations of Gender, Politics, and D.I.Y. in a Digital Age

This article examines the potential of recent feminist zines as frameworks of grassroots D.I.Y. and direct democracy in physical and digital communities. While the height of zine creations as works on paper may be traced to the 1990s, this form of feminist counterculture has evolved and persisted in cyberspace, predating, accompanying, and arguably outlasting the physical reality of protests, revolutions, and political expressions such as the Occupy Movement(s). Contemporary zines contain not only email addresses alongside ‘snail mail’ addresses, but also links to digital sites accompanying real-world resources. Zinesters today utilize the handmade craftsmanship and hand drawn and written techniques of zines in combination with the grassroots connectivity enabled by digital networks relating to zines. These physical and digital communities form interesting protest spaces. This paper explores the persistence and potential of zines as various expressions of personal and political feminist identities via maker culture and of explorations of the dimensionality of the screen and the page. The educational contexts considered in this paper include university zine collections, zine-making in K-12 teaching, as well as zine communities outside of schools and academia

Embodied Care: Exploring Mental Health Zines as Feminist Health Resources

In the traditional health information landscape, patriarchal knowledge practices of expertise, neutrality, objectivity, and ownership are held as the standard. This paper will explore zines as feminist mental health resources that embody radical care and subvert these knowledge practices. There are many personal zines on the topic of mental health, ranging from outlining self care strategies for overall mental wellness to deeper discussions of serious mental illness (trauma, mood disorders, personality disorders, etc). Even when not an explicitly feminist theme, I argue that these health zines are in themselves a feminist act. By utilizing attributes of feminist knowledge production, such as Personal Narrative, Embodiment, Intimacy, and Consciousness Raising, these zines disrupt the patriarchal information landscape. This disruption occurs by 1. questioning the notion of authority by (re)claiming lived experience expertise; 2. inviting readers into a conversation; and 3. (re)situating creators in an information landscape that often devalues and marginalizes their voices. Therefore, I aim to demonstrate that mental health zines represent an engaging opportunity for a feminist pedagogy in teaching health information literacy

A DIY Collection

The article discusses the collection of zines which the Barnard College library has been accumulating since 2003. The author describes how the proposal to collect zines was written and sold to the college's administration. Tips on how to acquire and organize a library zine collection are offered. Payment options, distributors, cataloging, and preservation are also examined