Zines & Pedagogy Workshop

This is a set of two blog posts from the POC Zine Project. The first talks about a positive zine-making experience in a middle school education context. The second (scroll down for "When Zine-Making in the Classroom Goes Very Wrong") is by POCZP founder Daniela Capistrano. Capistrano talks about where zine assignments can go wrong. Specifically, they look at race, gender, and power in the classroom and argue persuasively that a perzine or personal reflective zine is not appropriate in a classroom context, and that in fact, it's not truly a zine if it does not fully belong to the author. This is definitely the case when a perzine is a graded assignment. How can you grade what a person is willing to share of their lived experience? Particularly when the assigning professor is white / straight / male / non-disabled and asking students of color / queer students / women and non-binary folks / folks with disabilities to share lived experiences, the power differential is coercive, asking someone to lay their experience of oppression bare in a classroom setting for a grade.

Zines have begun to gain a place in higher education as pedagogical tools studied or made by students, and many academic libraries maintain zine collections. The library literature reveals little about how nonlibrarian faculty use zines in their classrooms. This paper describes the results of a survey of faculty from a range of academic disciplines and professions who teach with zines and other booklet forms.

This web based guide includes articles, powerpoints and lesson plans - covers so much ground!

Articles, lesson plans, and other resources to support teaching with zines.

This guide from the University of Puget Sound covers how to cite zines across several styles.

This article discusses zine making in middle school classrooms.

Provides brief overview of layout and design principles, with tips around setting up google slides, minding the margins, and more

Two sided PDF that covers the basics of setting up a zine to print and making sure the booklet printing works correctly.

Based on a thematic analysis of 73 zines collected from a 2019 zine fair, and qualitative interviews with 16 zine readers, in this article we consider the ‘felt value’ (Simmel 2005 [1916]) of zines.

While archival studies has already explored the collection and preservation of zines as cultural artefacts, this article explores the capacity for zines to act as a form of community archive.

"My thesis is a video focusing on the dichotomy of an academic library and a zine library. The film explores the convergence of of "above-ground", mainstream visions of academia and underground subculture, namely, zines. How does zine subculture function in an academic setting? Handmade and especially student-made media like zines have just as much of a place and a purpose in an academic library as scholarly texts. I am not a film expert, I am not a production major, I barely knew anything about filming and editing before diving into the making of this film. This film was intentionally and unintentionally messy, much like the format of a zine.I wanted to make a video about one of my favorite things I’ve ever been a part of, the New Paltz Zine Community. While our library is not the first of its kind, it’s still a very odd thing to be a part of an academic library (seriously, we have a zine about how to drop out of school in our collection). But odd isn’t bad. In fact, it’s necessary. In this film you will find some of the community, certainly not all of it, but some of my favorites." -- filmmaker and NP alum, Kelly Lindberg

$l00 & a T-Shirt, an original documentary by Joe Biel, illuminates the world of self-publishing and serves as a cultural analysis of what makes the thriving sub-culture of zinesters tick. Biel interviews about 70 zine makers, ex-zine makers, and readers from the northwest—all quirky and artistic young people who produce hand-crafted magazines which run the gamut from artistically ornate polemics to minimalist whimsical rants. They discuss the impetus to create zines, their genesis, self-publishing history, intricacies of the zine community, resources available for zine makers, and the genre's future. He gives us glimpses of the Portland Zine Symposium and takes us on a zine-themed bicycle tour around Portland. The program relays the sheer energy behind this DIY movement and offers interested viewers the nuts and bolts of small-scale publishing.

A collaboration of scientists, artists, students, and anyone else interested in science, this project produces small zines and web comics on a variety of topics . Read online, download zines, and share your ideas here.

Resources on zines and zine making, including a good list of digital repositories for zines.

A library guide to support zine making from a university library in L.A.