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Zines, Pamphlets, Artists' Publications, and Chapbooks: The World of Self-Publishing & Small Press

This zine provides history, context, and resources for students and faculty seeking to learn more about alternative publications as protest, as alternative culture, as art practice, and as community resource.

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

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