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This article consider how zine making might be understood as a participatory and DIY approach to research through a focus on zine making workshops with young fathers. Drawing upon Fletcher's conceptualisation of 'zine ethos', zines' DIY ethic, their democratic and participatory ideal and their transformative potential will each be considered reflexively, highlighting some of the ways these might be enacted through zine making in the context of research but also potentially constrained. This article extends existing empirical work concerning zines in the context of research and offers some fresh reflections on their value as a participatory and DIY approach to research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short reflective piece sets out the background to the Reclaim the (Night) Life project, an ongoing research project into sexual violence/harassment in the night-time economy of Leeds (UK). This initial output from the project, which has involved a team of five academics from the UK Centre for Event Management at Leeds Beckett University, is based on work produced at a co-creational zine-making workshop. The workshop involved a group of students, from the university, working with their lived experience and using the workshop to support them in undertaking some initial analysis of data captured from a prior online survey. Sociologically, the zine's purpose is to share initial research findings in a way that could engage its target demographic (young women), give voice to some of their experiences, explore zine making as a form of data capture and participant-led data analysis, and act as a prevocational device for the next stages of the Reclaim the (Night)Life research project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Joana Estrela, born in Penafiel in 1990, is a Portuguese illustrator and comics artist whose short but rich career path intersects significantly with the concerns of girlhood and the dynamics of the transnational creation and circulation of graphic narratives. In 2013, she self-published the zine, Os vestidos do Tiago, which was later re-published by the independent Luso-Brazilian publisher Sapata Press in 2018 and is now available in English with the title James's Dresses (2019). The zine is a short immersion into the fictional, though quite realistic, world of Tiago, a boy who loves wearing feminine dresses and is not scared of experimenting with them. Despite having a boy as protagonist, Os vestidos do Tiago can be looked at as Estrela's first attempt at representing girlhood, given the presence, in the publication, of crucial aesthetic references to the realm of childhood and femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What ethical and political considerations does zine-making raise in teaching and learning across knowledge systems and artful expression? This question guides the critical dialogue about a research project on teaching sustainability through traditional proverbs from Malaysia and Kazakhstan within a zine-making workshop in a UK university. Merging our reflections with that of students and their zine artworks alongside traditional proverbs, we dialogue across two tensions associated with the challenges of proverbial learning as decolonial connections or appropriation, and the politics and pedagogy of zine-making. Through these tensions which reveal the messy, ambivalent, and unsettled practices within the neoliberal university, we offer some reflections for researchers and teachers engaging in decolonial and arts-based praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the importance of virtual and non-traditional information sharing mediums to create better information access outcomes for people experiencing multiple forms of oppression simultaneously. Non-mainstream media platforms and formats like Tumblr and zines, are a valuable potential contribution to the discourse on coloniality, decoloniality, and how resistant knowledges manifest according to the needs of the people who create them. The information sciences are limited as a result of the majority white, abled nature of the field, and Tumblr and zines create a forum for out of the box thinking and re-search that creatively and thoughtfully sidesteps censorship. The paper is via a personal lens of lived experience and aims to uplift the recognition and validation of non-standard methods of information sharing used by BIPOC, Queer, and disabled communities. It underscores how these methods serve as vital avenues for community building, education, and the preservation and dissemination of marginalized voices and experiences. The paper emphasizes the necessity of acknowledging and integrating these unconventional sources into the broader landscape of information sciences, arguing for their value and legitimacy alongside traditional information repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1990s zine distros—small-scale, DIY distributors—emerged to become a vital part of zine communities by addressing the lack of established distribution channels, championing the medium, and fostering community. Before distros moved online in the 2000s, some produced paper catalogs to market and sell the zines they carried. These publications are complex documents that offer important information about zine distribution and culture unavailable elsewhere. This article considers the function of zine distros and what their catalogs can tell us. The first section provides an overview of 1990s zine distribution and examines how and why distros emerged when they did, arguing that distros offered something unique and important among distribution methods: distribution overseen by those embedded in zine communities that afforded creators the opportunity to reach a wider but controlled audience within a framework that valued support, participation, and community building. Yet a close examination of distros also reveals some of the problems inherent in these volunteer-run projects. The latter portion of this article analyzes catalogs produced by several distros. Catalogs, although short lived, document an important window of time: the emergence of distros, their optimism and efforts, and the role they played in zine distribution and communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper becomes a mapping of a PhEmaterialist research project, an apparatus entangled with re/making the world that applauds difference in education. Feeling-thinking-making with critical posthumanist work, we affirm that school climate matters and encourage educators’ attention to the fluxing materiality of school climate created through everyday schooling events. Daydreaming aptly accounted for our slow PhEmaterialist-inspired theoretical work, a transgressing and transversing of conventional conceptions of ‘school climate’, ‘methodology’ and ‘pedagogy’. Our school climate project emerges as an experimental mapping of eventful research, a slow research creation process where we attuned to emergent affirming pedagogical relationalities. Students worked alongside researchers over six weeks at an Australian community school, enacting research creation in the making of school climate. Da(r)ta created include voice recordings, reflective notes, written responses, photographs, narratives, soundscapes, zines, posters, drawings and maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary function of zines is often considered to be creative and expressive, and the function of other types of DIY ("do-it-yourself") micro-media as utilitarian (e.g., flyers as promotion), but all of these media also perform important social roles. DIY micro-media (e.g., zines, flyers, Internet pages, graffiti, wall signs, and "thank you" notes) are in this way embroiled in social lives of their makers and help them constitute themselves culturally and socially. DIY micro-media in this way also acquire their own social lives. Inspired by my ethnographic observations of the social lives of DIY micro-media within particular American DIY houses and music scenes, I examine in this article not only the content of DIY zines and micro-media (i.e., to study them as texts), but primarily the social role of zines and other DIY micro-media in the material, social, and affective constitution of DIY and music communities and scenes (i.e., to study them as social agents). Therefore, I show how these micro-media operate as material and media objects that are simultaneously shaped by and shaping human and social relations. By combining zine and micro-media studies with anthropology and material culture studies, I offer in this article a nuanced micro perspective, both ethnographic and emic, of the social processes implicated in the social and economic mutual constitution between media objects and music/art communities and scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This visual essay concerns the generative capacities of loss in the production and maintenance of community archives and archiving communities. In archival sites, the loss of space through the collection of items, as well as degradation and wear and tear, is a concern that traditional archival practice seeks to address, manage, and mitigate. However, through the discussion of two case studies—a participatory arts company in Stoke on Trent and zine archives and libraries in Manchester and Birmingham—loss can materialize as presence, through damp and clutter, evidence of community activity, and debate and discussion. Furthermore, the author argues that loss is generative of archives themselves by drawing from the ongoing work in the two sites, as well as the emergence of archival practice and debates specific to the communities themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arte, Individuo y Sociedad is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Arcos: Design, Cultura e Visualidade is the property of Editora da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EdUERJ) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores the parallels between historical zine culture and contemporary DIY computational publishing practices, highlighting their roles as countercultural movements within their own right. Both mediums, from zines of the 1990s to personal homepages and feminist servers, provide spaces for identity formation, community building, and resistance against mainstream societal norms. Drawing on Stephen Duncombe's insights into zine culture, this research examines how these practices embody democratic, communal ideals and act as a rebuttal to mass consumerism and dominant media structures. The paper argues that personal homepages and web rings serve as digital analogues to zines, fostering participatory and grassroots networks and underscores the importance of these DIY practices in redefining production, labour, and the role of the individual within cultural and societal contexts, advocating for a more inclusive and participatory digital landscape. Through an examination of both zines and their digital counterparts, this research reveals their shared ethos of authenticity, creativity, and resistance.

This paper explores arts-based practice research from the perspective of a UK University. In this context, Practice Research is still fraught with complexity that can result in communication issues. It can be challenging to confidently share insights and developments with readers outside of one’s discipline. There can be an overwhelming feeling of having to justify the value of one’s practice and over-explain every element to underline its worth. But what does Practice Research offer us and how can we, in the Arts, effectively communicate this to the broader academic community and beyond? Is there really a difference between practice-based and practice-led research or are there other ways to describe and share what we (academic practitioners) are creating? This paper will draw on specific examples from UK institutions to see how various challenges of communication and justification have been addressed at PhD level, through national research audits of academic staff, which also include considerations of the university research environment. I will discuss examples of successful practice-based research outputs from the University of Portsmouth that were part of the 2021 Research Excellence Framework (REF), a National published research government audit of UK academic institutions. I will show examples of how visual practitioners have contextualized their research outputs so that they can be “effectively shared.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how feminist social movements are organized and re‐generated across and through different media, both online and offline, using the example of zines. We critically examine the emergence and growth of an intersectional feminist zine community through a 6‐year in‐depth qualitative netnographic and ethnographic study. Theoretically, we build on work concerning feminist digital information and archival infrastructures, bringing it together with work on feminist digital activism. We make three key contributions: first to theorize zines and their communities as infrastructures, which cut across the social, digital, and material. Second in understanding the political potential of engagements in zine infrastructures in which the individual and collective are entangled, and third in revealing how the current generation of young feminists move across and work at the interfaces of formats to benefit from their synergistic, but also their agonistic, relations to form new affective solidarities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Orbis Tertius is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The emerging research on music fanzines in Central and Eastern Europe focuses almost exclusively on the production of the late 1980s (such as punk, skinhead, rock, metal), but leaves aside historically older periods. This article maps for the first time the terrain of privately (i.e. illegally) published Czech jazz fanzines across two totalities: in the final phase of the Nazi occupation and in the first phase of the communist regime. The case studies of Okružní korespondence [Circular Correspondence], Boptime and Jazz Express are followed by an analysis of other so far little-known independent publications as well as the so-called semi-official jazz press. I also deal with the issue of the repression of their creators. In the conclusion, I suggest how the research of fanzines and sources of a private nature can contribute to a re-evaluation of the “official jazz history” and to a deeper insight into the lived experience of jazz musicians and their supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Journal of Narrative Therapy & Community Work is the property of Dulwich Centre Publications and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Many interpretations of fandom communities as religious focus on fandom in relation to the "world religions" and the institutional authority they carry. By way of contrast, the author aims to interpret fandom based on religious practice, primarily the Christian Cult of the Saints as a practice of religious devotion. The perspective of religious practice emphasizes that the communities that form as fandom often exist in tension with more traditional religious networks, similar to saint cults. To demonstrate this parallelism, the author explores community formation around saints and fantasy characters as serious play expressed in books of hours and fanzines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how zines can be utilized to teach writing to middle school students. Zines, a genre of writing emphasizing liberation and justice, were central to a project aimed at encouraging students to participate in book club readings and subsequently write on themes related to their chosen books. The author concludes by highlighting that zines empower students' voices, allow them a means of queering composition, and enable them to envision a new world. [Extracted from the article]

This article analyzes Lithuanian youth subcultural group publications – fanzines (zines) – which have not yet received broader attention from researchers. Paper fanzines started to be created at the end of the 20th century and became popular in the 1990s, spreading Western culture ideas and changing the political, and socio-cultural environment in Lithuania along with technological copying and reproduction possibilities. Using resources from Lithuania’s Youth Culture Digital Archive “Lithuanian Zine Collection” and additionally collected sources, the article analyzes the trends in the creation and publishing of fanzines. By comparing the publishing similarities and differences of fanzines attributed to different subcultural groups, the aim is to understand the cultural context of these publications, their relationship with readers, and the publishing possibilities of fanzine creators. The study applies descriptive metadata analysis and systematization of fanzines, as well as ethnographic research methods (targeted interview, questionnaire, and qualitative interviews with fanzine authors, publishers, and collectors). The research results showed that in Lithuania, mainly in the 1990s, metal music fanzine authors, unlike punks and science fiction fans, created more publications written in English. Metal music fanzines were characterized by greater volume. Science fiction fans’ publications differed from those of metalheads and punks by a greater number of continuous issues and fewer one-time publications. Authors of fanzines associated with punk ideology mostly chose to independently reproduce publications using a copying machine, while creators of metal music and science fiction fanzines more often used professional printing services. The language used in fanzines and its style helped to form a close relationship with readers, revealed the identity traits of subcultural groups, and helped metal music fanzine authors to integrate into the international fanzine culture context. Seeking independence and individuality, fanzine creators disregarded professional publishing standards. Fanzine publishing depended on individual choice, motivation, creativity, reader interest, and technological possibilities (publication reproduction, layout). Fanzines created in Lithuania became one of the main forms of idea dissemination, creative freedom, and self-expression for alternative youth communication.

While starting as an analogue practice in fanzines, fanfiction in its current form, that is, almost exclusively online, is closely entangled with the technology it is embedded in, both Web 2.0 features and specific website infrastructure. This is nowhere better exemplified than on the platform Archive of Our Own (AO3), which hosts over 13 million stories in thousands of fandoms. AO3 is one of the most popular online repositories for fanfiction and growing exponentially, precisely because of how it deals with this slew of data: its system of extensive hyperlinked labelling. Based on empirical participant data from an online survey and semi-structured interviews, I argue that tags offer distinct affordances and affect user behaviour in such a way that new reading practices arise. Tags create a literacy paradigm interwoven with virtuality, relying on links and networks, and featuring a unique set of characteristics that differentiate reading on AO3 from other digital reading platforms, as well as from print fiction. These include "informed" reading, whereby site users know what they can expect from works, "rhizomatic" reading by navigating across the platform along the metadata, even to unfamiliar fandoms, and reading in multiple, which is facilitated by the site's searchability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article examines the political potential of the intimate, affective translation practices of Portuguese lesbian feminist activists in the publications Organa (1990–1992) and Lilás (1993– 2002). Both publications, which I analyze through the rubric of the countercultural genre of “zine” or “fanzine,” arose in response to the repression and invisibilization that Portuguese lesbians faced, from criminalization and censorship at the hands of the fascist Estado Novo [New State] dictatorship (1933– 1974) to exclusion from post-1974 feminist groups. Disconnected from any notion of lesbian identity and isolated from each other, the first lesbian activists turned toward experiences and connections abroad to build political consciousness. Using the self-published periodicals Organa and Lilás as their principal organizational tools, they could translate and circulate texts by lesbian feminist authors from countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. In doing so, they simultaneously created an open, egalitarian “lesbian-feminist counterpublic” (McKinney 2020, 19), allowing lesbians to meet each other on and between the publications’ pages through collaboration and expressions of desire. By analyzing the translational practices evident in the content, construction, and dissemination of Organa and Lilás, I identify and elaborate on a translation practice rooted in urgency, intimacy, and affectivity. Through the example of Portuguese lesbian feminism, I suggest that translation, far more than being a linguistic exercise or a transfer of information, has the capacity to be a tool for community-building and consciousness-raising, especially within groups that face marginalization and oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes the manner in which fanzine authors contextualize J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction within diverse literary traditions. Although rarely the topic of academic discussions in the 1960s, fanzine authors regularly contextualize The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien's unfinished fiction in terms of genre, canon and literary tradition. After examining and categorizing the authors and texts discussed in 80 fan letters and articles, I found that fan authors are almost evenly divided in the ways they contextualize Tolkien's fiction: as part of the fantasy tradition, as an inheritor of the epic or mythological genealogy, or as part of a third more eclectic tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes Lithuanian youth subcultural group publications - fanzines (zines) - which have not yet received broader attention from researchers. Paper fanzines started to be created at the end of the 20th century and became popular in the 1990s, spreading Western culture ideas and changing the political, and socio-cultural environment in Lithuania along with technological copying and reproduction possibilities. Using resources from Lithuania's Youth Culture Digital Archive "Lithuanian Zine Collection" and additionally collected sources, the article analyzes the trends in the creation and publishing of fanzines. By comparing the publishing similarities and differences of fanzines attributed to different subcultural groups, the aim is to understand the cultural context of these publications, their relationship with readers, and the publishing possibilities of fanzine creators. The study applies descriptive metadata analysis and systematization of fanzines, as well as ethnographic research methods (targeted interview, questionnaire, and qualitative interviews with fanzine authors, publishers, and collectors). The research results showed that in Lithuania, mainly in the 1990s, metal music fanzine authors, unlike punks and science fiction fans, created more publications written in English. Metal music fanzines were characterized by greater volume. Science fiction fans' publications differed from those of metalheads and punks by a greater number of continuous issues and fewer one-time publications. Authors of fanzines associated with punk ideology mostly chose to independently reproduce publications using a copying machine, while creators of metal music and science fiction fanzines more often used professional printing services. The language used in fanzines and its style helped to form a close relationship with readers, revealed the identity traits of subcultural groups, and helped metal music fanzine authors to integrate into the international fanzine culture context. Seeking independence and individuality, fanzine creators disregarded professional publishing standards. Fanzine publishing depended on individual choice, motivation, creativity, reader interest, and technological possibilities (publication reproduction, layout). Fanzines created in Lithuania became one of the main forms of idea dissemination, creative freedom, and self-expression for alternative youth communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writers, artists, activists, and others are finding creative ways to engage with, and disrupt and unsettle, commentaries on the climate emergency. In this article, we argue that the do-it-yourself ethic and aesthetic of zines (small-circulation, self-published magazines) and zine-making offers a creative and empowering approach to environmental storytelling, and that zines do different kinds of "work" around positioning, narrating, and responding to ecological problems. Through the idea of zine ecologies, we examine the entanglements between zines and zineing, environmentalism, environmental politics, literature, art, activism and protest, and more. The idea of zine ecologies has a dual existence in this article. We use this idea both as the provocation for a minizine that accompanies this article, but also to scaffold discussion of the quiet politics and activisms of student zine projects responding to, for example, an environmental writer, a piece of activist writing, or an environmental issue or scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the various activities, problem frameworks, and identity strategies around which feminist, lesbian, and trans-solidarity in the Polish-German collective Girlz Get United (GGU) were built. Focusing on oral history interviews with Suzi Andreis, a member and co-organizer of the GGU meetings, this study examined the transnational and intersectional collectivity of the group as a form of lesbian solidarity. Following Emma Goldman and bell hooks, it attempted to consider how the collective, active in the early 2000s, constructed solidarity by being together during integration meetings, various workshops, and sports encounters. The article also examines the content appearing in the bilingual "ggu!" bulletins issued by the group during its active period. It exposes the rupture and contradictions between different ways of building lesbian solidarity: on the one hand, as a positive experience of sociability and friendship evoked through oral history interviews and, on the other hand, as an archival political manifesto told through a zine story of trauma and violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyzes a corpus of fanzines produced between 1986 and 1993 in various cities in the province of Buenos Aires and the Argentine capital. Created using affordable techniques and materials with non-profit motives, these publications were part of different political-cultural initiatives linked to anarchist activism and the underground punk scene. Adopting a methodological perspective in which the magazines constitute polyvalent and heterogeneous objects, our analysis considers their material, textual, and visual dimensions, as well as the distribution methods adopted. Based on this premise, we aim to recover the residual and emergent elements that engage with the past and present of a period marked by the process of democratic recovery and consolidation. Finally, we trace the connections established between these publications, through the overlap of spaces, individuals, and events referenced within the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this visual essay, students enrolled in a museum education and administration specialization, centered in a university art education department, respond to course readings on museum work and Emergent Strategy through journaling and 'zine making. While the course is intended to prepare students for the political and practical realities of working in an art museum, it is structured to elicit group and individual understandings of the readings, projects, and other assignments as well as to consider the ways in which we can collectively and incrementally create museological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on reevaluating self-sponsorship within contemporary extracurricular writing practices, examining Do It Yourself (DIY) publishing festivals and the materiality of publications. Topics include the evolution of DIY publishing landscapes, the integration of digital tools, and the conceptualization of sponsorship within literacy narratives, emphasizing the interplay between agency, materiality, and desire in writing practices outside traditional academic settings.

In the age of Generative Artificial Intelligence, where students can generate longform writing pieces within seconds, how do we rethink the process and value of literary analysis? This article details a project from a required first-year undergraduate literature course that used zines to teach literary analysis. This article includes all components of the project, including discussion prompts, scaffolded assignments, and several reflections from students on how this project changed their understanding of and relationship to literary analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]