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Pace University Zine Library

Use this guide to learn more about the Pace University Zine LIbrary, a rich, growing collection that includes zines, chapbooks, pamphlets, artists' magazines, artists' books, and more. .

Browse the title and descriptions of the Pace Zine, DIY & Small Press Collection

Video Recording: Zine Pedagogies Workshop spring 2021 (Faculty Center)

Some Basic Questions to Consider

Ongoing, Useful Questions for Pedagogy

  • More discussion about zine definition: what is a zine? A digital zine? A digitized zine? Who gets to decide?
  • How much is student voice and authority amplified, really? When is 1st person permitted in undergraduate academic writing; when when is it powerful and authoritative?
  • How do zines make student work and the student experience more inclusive?
  • Audience and Accessibility? Are zinesters seeking community? understanding? wide readership? Digital zines are in theory totally public, while print zines are more exclusive.
  • Agency? Will students activate their zines in the world? Should they have to? Should we plan for something like a zine drop at City Hall or at a bookstore? Participation at a zine fair? Zines as Pamphlets—urgent communication.
  • For Librarians: how do zine-making or zine-interpretation assignments relate to the ACRL Information Literacy Framework?

Why Consider Zines and DIY Publications?

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

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"

Zine Pedagogy at Pace (Examples)

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.

Zine Making as a Research Method