Pace University Zine Library

The Pace Zine Library can be utilized in two ways: 1. Class visits booked in advance 2. A "portable library" situation in which the faculty member and/or a zine librarian brings selected zines to a classrooom.

The ZL has different scheduled hours every semester and is not open all day every day like the Beekman Library. The ZL is open by appointment, beyond the posted hours. In order to provide the best experience and to share the most relevant materials, classroom visits need to be scheduled in advance. Please contact Susan Thomas <sthomas7@pace.edu> to book a visit. The ZL is a noncirculating collection, and items don't leave the space without prior discussion and planning. 

Zines are self-published booklets of original or appropriated text and images, increasingly present in higher education, where they are used as an exploratory pedagogical tool for the development of student voice, self-awareness, creativity, and authority, outside of the strict parameters of scholarly communication and mainstream media.

"Zines can offer students a sense of ownership that other types of writing, especially
classroom writing, do not provide. Zines also introduce students to multimodal,
or multigenre composing, within a single document. Including zines as part of the
curriculum also models for students a variety of vehicles for meaning-making, and can
provide a more broad spectrum of identities and experiences with which students can
relate. These benefits challenge the status quo in terms of authority, revealing the process
by which a writer attains credibility on a particular topic." Chelsea Lonsdale [1]

[1] Chelsea Lonsdale, “Engaging the ‘Othered’: Using Zines to Support Student Identities,”
Language Arts Journal of Michigan 30, 2 (2015): 12

Check out this interview, "Abby Schleifer on zines, librarianship, and designing for critical engagement in an age of AI" with Abby, First Year Services Librarian at Beekman Library and Co-Director (with Susan Thomas and Derek Stroup) of the Pace Zine Library.

Check out this interview between Susan Thomas and Professor Elodie Silberstein from Pace's Women's and Gender Studies department on their ongoing zine pedagogy collaboration: Elodie Silberstein & Susan Thomas (2022) Zine-making pedagogy during a pandemic: reflections and implications, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 24:5, 815-825, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2022.2138491

Watch this heavily illustrated slideshow, "Pace Zine Library Teaching Constellations" created in 2023 by Derek Stroup for an event at the Pace Faculty Center about zine pedagogy.

Here's a great undated blog post by Liz Mayorga, People of Color Zine Project (POCZP) West Coast Coordinator: "Let's Talk About Zines in the Classroom, Pros and Cons"

Women & Film Past & Present: Asynchronous, Pandemic-Era Class taught by Elodie Silberstein. This slide shows two images from student zines uploaded in VoiceThread in Classes as well as some comments from a student survey.