Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship
Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship is an open access, open peer-reviewed journal published by the Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative. Established 2019 ISSN 2687-9018 (online)
Unless otherwise specified by the author/s (because the work contains components to which the author/s do not hold copyright, e.g. licensed music/artwork), works are published using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. Authors may also elect to license their works under more permissive terms at their discretion. Authors retain copyright and publishing rights of their work without restriction. We ask as a courtesy that republished works acknowledge Unbound as a previous venue of publication.
What do we owe each other? What can(not) be shared? Édouard Glissant conceptualizes the poetic as a means to imagine relationality otherwise, beyond extractivism and subjugation (Poetics of Relation). Poetic opacities are intersubjective articulations of what cannot be known of the other, yet must be embraced by an interpersonal generosity to “give-on-with” the other’s unknowable differences (Glissant 142). Despite the gaps between us, we relate to one another through a desire to share our experiences, to give access to our embodied and affective realities. This is not necessarily a desire to be understood, as Glissant shows, understanding can be violent in its reduction. Rather, I view relationality as an affective co-presence, an entangling of separate bodies and their innumerable, ungraspable differences. I Want You to Have This is my attempt to engage the poetics of our shared relation in all its opacities. I want to give you access to my perspective. I hope that it illuminates (or opacifies) something of your own experience of self, and being-with others. In this zine, I visually and textually explore Glissant’s three entangled concepts of opacity, relationality and poetics through the metaphor of “the angel’s share.” During the maturation of whiskey, a certain percentage of volume is lost through evaporation from the cask; this loss is said to be shared with angels for the returned promise of a quality batch. We are all angels; we share, we take, we try; something is lost, something is gained, yet I don’t know what this thing is. In short, I want you to have this.
Copyright (c) 2026 Oisin Sheerin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
As we were wrapping up production of this special issue, a group of Texas anti-ICE activists were convicted of charges including providing support for terrorism, attempted murder of a police officer, and rioting. Prosecutors alleged the defendants were part of “an antifa cell,” the first time anti-fascist protestors were charged under U.S. anti-terrorism statutes. One member of the group was charged with “corruptly concealing a document or record” for the possession and transport of leftwing and anti-fascist zines and pamphlets. It should go without saying that we don’t condone shooting a police officer. But setting aside the absurdity of designating antifa a terrorist organization, which as Sam Levine rightly notes in The Guardian, is “not an organization but instead used to describe a constellation of leftwing beliefs,” we absolutely endorse the right to peaceably assemble to protest injustice and state violence, and support the clear 1st Amendment right to write, print, and distribute zines with any content. It’s a little bit stunning, in this age convulsive media shift, the age of agentic AI, LLMs, and TikTok, to find zines front and center in a criminal case that will no doubt figure as a watershed in 1st Amendment and anti-terrorism law as it wends its way through appeals. It certainly wasn’t on our Bingo card as we conceived of this special issue. But this incident reveals a truth that underlies the urgency of the work we and the international contributors are doing here: when oppressive regimes threaten the self-representation of socially and politically marginalized and stigmatized communities, zines emerge as a powerful implement of resistance and self-expression. For this special issue, we invited proposals from contributors across the disciplines to share their scholarly and creative work in zine form. While academics may not seem to be a marginalized or stigmatized group, and we readily acknowledge the many ways in which we do dwell in privilege, there are a number of factors that threaten freedom of expression and scholarly independence both in the US and globally. Populist authoritarian movements around the world exercise control by encouraging their followers to be contemptuous of expertise and evidence, and foster anti-intellectualism as a means of undermining critique and resistance. This, along with the active campaign against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher education, has created a political and cultural environment hostile to academics. Economic forces are also at work to limit the impact of academic freedom. Corporate interests in academic publishing have a stranglehold on the pipeline to publication, supported by myths of prestige and meritocracy, and sustained by the free labor of scholars for authorship, peer review, and editorial work. And more insidiously, generative AI is unreflectively supported by university administrators eager to cash in on the hype, and is trained by extracting the published work of academics, without their consent. These corporate interests are ultimately inimical to academic freedom and hostile to critical inquiry. As we describe in the Academizines! Manifesto that opens this special issue, zines have the potential to create wider publics for academic scholarship. We follow Jentery Sayers, Natalie Loveless, Anastasia Salter, and Emilie Johnson in encouraging acts of research-creation and critical making. And we optimistically suggest that, by sharing our work outside the walled garden of Big Academic Publishing, we can also overcome some of the hostility for higher learning and scholarship - making our work more accessible can make it less threatening. The zines assembled here range from meta-zines that reflect on the process and materiality of zines, to critical auto-ethnography in the form of personal or perzines, to straightforward scholarly essays in zine form. There are several zines created by librarians to highlight their services and collections, as well as zines that explore the nature of zine librarianship and the particular care such work requires. There are zines here that are purely visual, and zines that are carefully designed in software, and zines that are hand written and hand drawn. The material forms of the zines are as diverse as their creators and their subject matter, taking the form of single-sheet minizines and half-letter booklets, and there’s even an accordion book. To be as inclusive as possible, we encouraged our contributors to make a good faith best effort at making the digital copies of their zines accessible, recognizing that there are limits to digital accessibility for both manuscript and purely visual forms. To level the field among contributors, we deliberately did not include credentials or institutional affiliations. If a work is vital and engaging, it shouldn’t matter if it was created by an undergraduate, a professor, or a civilian. The work is the work. The development of this issue has been slower than we had hoped. The world is on fire. We’ve experienced a range of personal traumas and losses while this work has been in gestation, and our brains and bodies have responded to that stress in various ways. While the behind the scenes work of metadata, document compression, and copy editing went on, a vibrant community formed among the creators on a Discord server and the conversations there have sustained us as we have toiled in the background. We’re grateful to our contributors for their kind forbearance. We think what follows in this issue is worth the wait. For us, this issue is a celebration of our combined over half a century of engagement with zines as a creative form. It is a convergence of our creative, scholarly, and personal lives. We hope both our contributors and our readers find something here that challenges them, uplifts them, and from which they can learn and grow as scholars and creatives. So please, read on, enjoy, and then go make your own Academizines!
Copyright (c) 2026 Spencer D. C. Keralis, Zach Frazier https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Warning! Integration in Design is Never Neutral
Designers are never neutral. Positioned as integrators, they decide what knowledge enters a process, whose voices are amplified, and what futures are foreclosed. These decisions often remain invisible, yet they carry profound ethical and political consequences. This zine acts as a public service announcement, exposing the hidden forces - bias, positionality, methods, tools, and institutional dynamics that shape integration in design and demand greater accountability from those who practice it. Through vignettes, the zine draws on reflexive and autoethnographic fragments to reveal moments where integration falters - when certain voices dominate, when institutional priorities override care, or when dominant tools mask certain perspectives. These fragments show that design is always an act of (in)justice, mediated through integrative choices, external forces, and that accountability lies with designers to recognize and respond to these stakes. Structured with warnings, provocations, and visual metaphors, the zine urges designers to pause and ask: Whose knowledge am I privileging and silencing? How does my positionality shape what counts as credible? How am I accountable for these outcomes? Rather than prescribing solutions, the zine holds space for discomfort and reflexivity as essential steps toward justice by design. It challenges designers to approach integration with greater consciousness and care, not as passive collectors of knowledge but as conscious mediators of power, meaning, and inclusion. Speaking to design communities and wider publics, the zine insists designers can be agents of justice, fostering knowledge integration for design justice.
Copyright (c) 2026 Johnathan Subendran https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Ghosts of Times Square: A Zine Exploring Representations of Times Square through Film
My zines are often an extension of my research—either a jumping off point or a way to create a more visual project (or both). They are in their own way a form of excess - they are often too scandalous, too smutty, too much — everything that is spilling out of the margins. My zines and research focus on lesser known queer histories, trying to highlight them and bring them to a new audience and new generations. Using zines as a creative form of research, I am able to reach a broader audience both inside and outside of academia. I see it as a way to connect with the greater queer community and bridge what I am doing in these different spaces: the medium of zines includes the community that comes with it. In this zine, I highlight films depicting Times Square from the late 1960s through early 80s including Taxi Driver, Shaft, News From Home, and then I share more in-depth research on the films Pink Narcissus and Flesh. I include a map of Times Square to think about how the films map onto the city, thinking about films as historical documents with the backdrop/sets of a Times Square that no longer exists and how queerness and desire map onto the city. I specifically also included lots of resource lists because I felt like I could not capture everything I wanted within the zine, and I wanted those who had the curiosity to have other avenues to continue that interest.
Copyright (c) 2026 Kel R. Karpinski, Queer Sailors Zines https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The Workshop Zine for Workshopping Workshops
The Workshop Zine for Workshopping Workshops is an activity zine intended to either accompany future iterations of The Workshop Workshop for Workshopping Workshops (developed at the Digital Naturalisms Conference, 2025), or to be completed as a standalone activity. The intention is to serve as a pedagogical tool for developing pedagogical tools. Knowing how to do something is not the same as knowing how to teach someone how to do something. Building a workshop is in itself an art, and as such can be practiced and perfected. For the purposes of this we are defining a workshop as a small group, limited session educational experience. That is a loose descriptive definition, certainly not a prescriptive one. Generally speaking, workshops are about skill or knowledge transfer, and can be hands-on (making something) but are sometimes just mouths on (talkbacks, development sessions, collaborative experiences), or take another form entirely. The zine serves to move the reader from idea to practice.
Copyright (c) 2026 libi rose striegl https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
What happens when we turn a violent tool of death into a means of critical self expression? In the fall of 2023, students in my Opinion Media class produced a class zine that used "gun-ink" from a decomposed AR-15 assault rifle that was turned into grey pigment by the North-Carolina artist Thomas Little. The ink was high in iron, and therefore had the scent of blood. Students in the class each had one page in the zine to write true-to-them personal stories about their experience with gun violence in the U.S. They used the ink to illustrate their work. The zines were risograph-printed by Rathaus Press in Rochester, New York.
Copyright (c) 2026 Hinda Mandell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
Sex Workers and the Case for Decriminalization vs. Legalization
Sex Worker Decrim Now! Zines are sous Ivory Tower. Not just so-called “low culture,” but coming from below and (most often) to the left. They are the antithesis of traditional academia; a grassroots way to disseminate vital information and cultural knowledge that are also peer-reviewed in real time like their academic counterparts. As someone equally intellectual and active, part of my contribution to collective liberation and community care is filling in gaps in information. As a sex worker-based harm reductionist, I could not find literature expressly on the discussion of and fight for the decriminalization for versus the legalization of sex work to disseminate during my runs. Much like in academic research when one cannot find a substantial (or any) amount of literature to begin an analysis and review for an undertaking, I saw a need for and an opportunity to contribute to the “field” as it were (or, in this case, movement) and help fill in that information gap. As a peer, I was able to both find and use known and other sex worker colleagues’ own words and advocacy actions to explain their fight. In keeping with praxis and community care, I also created a resource log in the back pages. In keeping with my ethos to protect and preserve radical access to information, the PDF of this zine has been added to my open-access living zine archive, like all other zines I make or obtain.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jen (JD) Derless https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
ZineCat is the home of a union catalog dedicated to zines. A union catalog is a resource where libraries can share cataloging and holdings information from their individual collections. The Zine Union Catalog (ZUCJ facilitates researchers' discovery of zine holdings by searching a single catalog search interface, and helps catalogers copy records, and facilitates the lending of materials between libraries. ZUC serves educators, researchers, creators, librarians, archivists, and anyone in the general public with an interest in zines.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jenna Freedman, Lauren Kehoe https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In the spring of 2003 I drove with my mom from the suburbs to the Montrose area of Houston, Texas to buy zines from Sound Exchange–the one place I knew that sold them–so that I could send some sample reviews to Punk Planet magazine (1994-2007). Sound Exchange is a vinyl record store that first opened in 1979 and was located in a two-story red brick house at the corner of Richmond Avenue from 1998 until 2019 when it moved to Second Ward in Houston’s East End neighborhood. Like many other places in Houston, the lot was bought by a developer for new construction. As a writer and zinester who has lived the majority of my life in Houston I now find myself meditating on the passage of time and how to reflect the felt value of such spaces in zine form (Watson & Bennet, 2021). After a long hiatus and many life changes I began creating zines again in 2022. I am drawn to the one-page format in particular as it is both easy to complete and assemble and because it allows me to create a uniquely distilled physical object in today’s primarily digital landscape (Blake, 2020). Further, I am inspired by the viral social media trend (Picaro, 2025) that uses Google Maps Street View to find images of deceased relatives, old houses, and other nostalgic glimpses of the past (Hu, 2020). This paper will use my recent zines about Houston as examples of how the form can be used to create a landscape of personal media archaeology.
Copyright (c) 2026 Claire Sewell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This deluxe minizine contains two narratives in one. On the front side in minizine format is a personal story about how the author was raised anti-abortion but grew up to become a staunch reproductive justice advocate. On the reverse side in flyer format is information about the reproductive justice movement, a brief discussion of why the zine was created, along with recommended reading and citations. TW: abortion, foster care
Copyright (c) 2026 Jule Setele https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
The scholarly communications ecosystem is collapsing. Hopelessly polluted by capitalist and neoliberal priorities for research and higher education, the trad publishing ecosystem is now toxic to scholars at every stage of their professional lives. We must abandon this swamp to survive. We must seize the means of scholarly production from corporate publishers and the scholarly journals beholden to them. Micropublishing has long been the weapon of choice for marginalized and stigmatized communities to combat the oppression of corporate publication. The hegemony of capitalist interests in publishing has silenced and exploited minority creators through tokenistic selection processes and outright censorship. We reject the premise that micropublishing lacks the rigor of so-called prestige publishing, and further reject corporate metrics for scholarly impact like citation indices and other quantitative measures, in favor of alternative metrics assessing volume of circulation and engagement, and qualitative means of assessing impact. We offer zines as a powerful form of public writing. We believe that creating wider publics for academic scholarship by making our work more accessible is a greater measure of scholarly impact and can improve goodwill for higher education and research in these anti-intellectual times.
Copyright (c) 2026 Zach Frazier, Spencer D. C. Keralis https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Julie Dachez (author) & Mademoiselle Caroline (illustrator). 2020. Invisible Differences: A Story of Asperger’s, Adulting, and Living a Life in Full Color.
Invisible Differences: A Story of Asperger’s, Adulting, and Living a Life in Full Color is a graphic novel that relates the story of a young woman’s journey to an Asperger’s diagnosis. Originally written in French, the book was translated by Edward Gauvin for author Julie Dachez and illustrator Mademoiselle Caroline. In this thinly veiled autobiography of Dachez, the story follows Marguerite as she goes about her daily business, which largely consists of going to and from work, as well as her actual job. We also learn the difficulties she faces with noise, interacting with people socially, and her relationship with her boyfriend. The first half of the book is in black and white with the occasional color here and there. It is the other half that blooms with color once Marguerite has a diagnosis, meets people who also have a diagnosis of Asperger’s, and starts to adjust her life in a way that fits her better. Throughout the entire book, Marguerite’s sneakers are red, symbolizing her individuality and uniqueness in contrast to the people around her, who are typically only in black, white, and grey. Color is used initially to highlight distressing conversations or situations. Eventually, color comes to focus on Marguerite’s embracing of her diagnosis and living her life in ways that best suit her and make her happy. Drawn and colored in the classic French bande dessinée style, colors are largely bold and in primary colors with some shading as needed to emphasize a point. For example, on page 15, we see Marguerite sitting at her desk at work. There are a series of panels that depict office noises such as computer keys being tapped, people talking, and so on. The background color starts as white at the top of the page, but gets progressively shaded from a light red to a dark red to help symbolize that all of the noise is bothering Marguerite intensely. Besides the use of color to help us understand how Marguerite navigates the world, there is also the narrator. While a narrator is a standard part of many stories, the narrator directly addressing the reader is not as typical. On page 64, the narrator addresses the reader directly to make it clear that we have been witness to various aspects of Marguerite’s life and her difficulty navigating the life she is, up until that moment, currently living. The narrator tells us, “You might be getting tired of these repetitive panels, but Marguerite finds this routine reassuring. Passing by her bookstore, then the bakery, the streets, the stairwell…It’s all about rituals.” More than just addressing us, the narrator also comments on the physical form of the narrative in this example by calling out the comic strip panels. The narrator helps us make the connection between Marguerite’s differences, as in human interactions, her eventual diagnosis, and the bande dessinée form. One of the more interesting aspects of the book is that the back matter examines autism and Asperger’s diagnoses in France. There’s also discussion of why either condition is not diagnosed as readily as it is in the United States. I highly recommend this graphic novel, not just for its contribution to graphic medicine depicting Asperger’s in translation, but because at its heart, the graphic novel is both the story of one person and an educational tool for the reader to understand Asperger’s more readily.
Copyright (c) 2026 JJ Pionke https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Trustpassing is a series of four zines that share collective stories from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, about how digital vulnerabilities intersect with material forms of security and safety, including but not limited to emergency housing, sex workers’ rights, job security, policing and law enforcement, and access to safe spaces. The zines stem from a community-centred project in partnership with Jelena Vermillion, Executive Director of the Sex Workers’ Action Program (SWAP), Hamilton. Employing a zine as participatory action research methodology (French and Curd 2021; Kindon et al. 2007), the project documented and mobilized expertise drawn from lived experience, positioning participants as knowledge holders (Cornish et al. 2023; Lovata, 2008) whose insights challenge dominant assumptions about what digital safety looks like and who is considered at risk. Mainstream digital security frameworks treat end users generically. We all face common vulnerabilities. By practising good ‘cyber hygiene’, we strengthen our first line of defence and protect ourselves. In this approach, cyber risks and threats are often seen as individual choices, shifting responsibility onto end users (Basu & Biddolph 2025) This project steps back from treating digital security as a universal resource that benefits everyone equally, aiming to examine the digital insecurities and threats that are often overlooked by mainstream frameworks (Bengtsson Meuller, 2023; Chen et al. 2022; Cristiano et al. 2023; Gajjala et al. 2026). How do digital security frameworks identify end users who already face social stigma? What are the varied impacts of digital safety and security? How are digital (in)securities connected to the experience of material security and access to basic necessities? How do people who rely on social services, lack stable housing, and engage in street-based sex work come to be disproportionately subjected to invasive and unwarranted surveillance that is routinely justified as ‘protection’ or ‘security’? More broadly, this project asks whether reorganizing our understanding of digital security to include the social dimensions of insecurities and vulnerabilities alongside the technical ones can help shift where accountability is placed. From January to May 2025, we hosted 11 workshops on Thursday evenings at the YWCA in downtown Hamilton, drawing roughly 220 participants. The first 7 sessions focused on creative practices such as collaging and blackout poetry, each guided by a set of prompts. The final 4 workshops shifted to reviewing rough zine drafts and gathering participant feedback to inform the final design. Across the 7 content generation workshops, the prompts moved from broad questions about safety and security to more specific reflections on participants’ experiences in digital environments. Rather than impose fixed definitions of digital safety, security, or harm, we intentionally kept these concepts open. Our goal was to understand how participants themselves experience, articulate, and interpret these concepts. Although we developed a plan for each workshop, we approached the workshops iteratively. We prioritized keeping our data generation methods responsive to participants’ needs and engagement (Benjamin-Thomas et al. 2018). As a result, we returned to collaging multiple times because it proved to be the most accessible, comfortable, and generative method for our participant community. Across the four-volume series, the zines bring together safety and security strategies, calls to action, shared experiences, anecdotes, and striking visuals, some of which were remixed during the design process. Because all content was generated directly through the workshops, the material reflects participants’ own language, insights, and priorities. While the volumes are interconnected, each can also be read on its own, a structure that supports ease of reproducibility. Together, the volumes capture distinct ways that safety and security manifest in participants’ lives, with each subtitle drawn from statements and observations shared by participants. Volume 1, Technology Gives You Freedom, moves from the emancipatory potential of technology to the vulnerabilities and harms participants encounter online and offline, establishing the relationship between material and digital forms of security and safety. Volume 2, Insecurity Is Good Business, examines how insecurity is built into technological infrastructures, from social media platforms to law enforcement systems, and how people are secured in uneven and inequitable ways. Volume 3, We All Feel Secure Until We Are Not, builds on this analysis by exploring the business model of insecurity that underpins the internet, while also highlighting the ‘differential vulnerabilities’ (Pierce et al. 2018) participants face, including reflections on the City of Hamilton ransomware attack (Beattie 2024) and the prioritization of technological development over core forms of social security such as housing, income, food access, mental health supports, and childcare. Volume 4, Digital Safety Doesn’t Mean You’re Safe, turns toward mitigation strategies used by street-based sex workers and expands into broader questions about what constitutes safety and security, emphasizing that these concepts are not universal. It surfaces key insights into potential forms of (digital) safety that could make street-based work safer, offering an open-ended proposition about what becomes prioritized and what is overlooked when we talk about safety and security. The zine format was indispensable to the project. First and foremost, we needed a form that could cohere individual experiences into a collective narrative while accommodating multiple modes of expression, including visual and textual content. We also needed a form that could be disseminated quickly, easily reproduced and shared, and that could carry community knowledge outward (Baker and Cantillon 2022; Lovata 2018). The zine form offered all of this while also challenging traditional academic conventions about who produces knowledge and whose expertise counts (Vong 2016). We wanted the immediate public output to be something participants could recognize themselves in, take ownership of, and be proud of. A core aim of Trustpassing is to function for its readers as “engines of critical engagement, self-questioning, and renewal” (Joseph and Sawyer 2023, 13) by foregrounding participant knowledge and expertise, inviting critical reflection, and opening space for alternative ways of understanding digital safety, security, and power.
Copyright (c) 2026 Andrea Zeffiro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
Artificial Intelligence (AI), including generative AI, is marketed and widely discussed as a great benefit to many, especially to disabled and neurodivergent individuals. It appears to level the playing field, so to speak, by making certain tasks and work more accessible, performing the often disproportionately draining mental labor of tasks such as creating outlines, timetables for completing assignments, and more. While we recognize the potential benefits of solutions to these known challenges, the rapid development and adoption of generative AI largely bypasses meaningful civic input. Decisions about its suitability, design, and impacts are made largely by private and technocratic interests, with little critical engagement from the communities it claims to serve. As a result, the narratives around AI eclipse questions of suitability, and whether the adoption of AI systems and technologies are worth the consequences. When it comes to technology, including AI, intent matters, but what often matters most are the impacts of decisions. The adoption of any tool or system must be preceded by critical evaluation, assessment, and an understanding of environmental context and consequences. The choice to adopt or reject the use of AI is to be made intentionally, involving a deeper commitment to civic engagement: inclusive, participatory processes that shape not just how AI is used, but also how it is governed. This zine will explore questions around the intersection of generative AI and disability, examining the ways in which the purported benefits of generative AI are not actually benefitting anyone, disabled or not, through a disability justice lens. Instead, we work together to imagine alternative futures, where AI is not inevitable, and where we can envision a more just, equitable, and radically kind world. Together, we ask our audience if they are willing and prepared to refuse systems of harm.
Copyright (c) 2026 Anna Boutin-Cooper, Andrea Puglisi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Exploring Zine Making as Critical Dialogue
This academic zine was generated through a semester-long weekly dialogue between two assistant professors at the University of North Dakota. Faccin-Herman, Art and Design, considers zines a flexible pedagogical tool that engages mind and body in creating a tangible object. Wigard, English, approaches zines from a comics studies background (literary heritage, visual communication, small press comix) and digital humanities methodology (archiving, circulation, digitization). Rather than a straightforward critical conversation on pedagogy between two colleagues, this endeavor used the zine as a medium to creatively concretize responses, foster interdisciplinary conversations, and capture the experiences of being early career faculty at an R-1, rural university. In other words, the zine is a recording of weekly conversations between Faccin-Herman and Wigard conducted through campus mail, with each educator contributing to the zine in response to each other’s prompts. This can be seen in the accordion-style format of the zine, where each page represents a back-and-forth between the scholars, the form unfolding as the semesterly conversation does. In this way, the scholars not only practice what Ratto and others might term “Critical-Making,” but visually explore their pedagogical practice with and through the zine. Drawing on the work of cartoonists Lynda Barry, Kay Sohini, and Meghan Parker, book creator Esther K. Smith, and scholar Matt Ratto, the project (we hope) demonstrates the vital potential of the zine for academic purposes: as scholarly record, as pedagogical device, as interdisciplinary collaboration. A coda: Faccin-Herman and Wigard met on their first day at UND, standing in line for coffee and idly striking up a conversation when, quite organically, we discovered we both worked with zines. Yet, despite working a quarter-mile from each other’s offices (literally, separated by the English Coulee), teaching within the same institutional College of Arts & Sciences, and spending a year together in a first-year faculty cohort, Faccin-Herman and Wigard had not previously had an opportunity to discuss pedagogy with one another in depth, let alone how each incorporates zines into curricula. Our responses and conversations are genuine, truly passing back and forth through campus mail. This project encouraged us to connect with our academic specialists and librarians, and we have begun working on an archival collection of regional Midwest zines. This project allowed us to collaborate academically, through a medium we were already familiar with and to learn more about how Visual Arts (Graphic Design) and English (Comics Studies) can come together to break academic traditions.
Copyright (c) 2026 Vitoria Faccin-Herman, Justin Wigard https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Zines can be used in the library as a method of outreach. They are a non-traditional medium to engage and educate users about library resources and other related topics. In an effort to support zine making as research, pedagogy, and creation at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, the Digital Scholarship Services department in Miller Nichols Library has begun to be the main support of zine creation and dissemination. This particular zine was made to support a book display on Afro-Futurism for Black History Month in 2026. Afro-Futurism was coined by scholar Mark Dery, and was defined at that time as “African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (180). Thinking about black futures through the lens of science fiction, history, and liberation, this movement has become a strong creative outlet for artists and scholars of all kinds. Mixed with ideas and aesthetics on astronomy, technology, and traditional African diaspora, Afro-Futurism provides a glimpse into imagined futures for black people through an expanded critical and creative lens. Functioning as a vehicle for library patrons to learn more about this movement, this zine focuses on resources that patrons can access through library resources. It is not meant to completely encapsulate the genre; it serves as an introduction through cultural touchstones. This zine was created digitally using Canva, using graphics and other openly-licensed images from Wikimedia Commons. Copies were printed and distributed at the book display throughout February 2026. In addition to this informative resource, the display also included a create-your-own zine station. At this station, patrons practiced making zines and were notified of the other Zine related events happening throughout the library.
Copyright (c) 2026 Chayanne Sandoval-Williams, Katie Antrainer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
ZC/ZL: Imagining Relationships Between Zine Creators and Zine Librarians
Current zine library scholarship largely focuses on best practices for zine libraries provided by zine librarians for zine librarians—with only a small subsection of research investigating the attitudes and desires of zine creators themselves. This study used an online survey to gather information from both zine librarians and zine creators about their current and ideal interactions with each other. The study finds that nearly all participants view relationships between the two groups as important and that ideal relationships feature communication, collaboration, and respect for the agency of zine creators over their work. Results also reveal insights about zine culture as a whole, positive and negative characteristics of zine libraries, and a discussion of the balance of power between zine librarians, zine creators, and libraries as institutions. This research is presented as a zine in an academic journal, and specifically as a split zine, with one side focused on the experiences and wishes of zine creators and the other side focused on those of zine librarians. Both of these choices are designed to reflect the dual subjects and audience of this research (both zine-ish and academic, with neither taking precedence). My hope is that this journal will reach zine librarians, the zine will reach zine creators, and both groups will take the opportunity to learn more about not just their colleagues but about each other, thereby strengthening their relationships and zine libraries as a whole.
Copyright (c) 2026 Al Cassada https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In “Comparative Literature as Collage: A Zine,” I propose that studying comparative literature is somewhat akin to making a collage: both strive to uncover new meanings by putting different elements in an alien environment. The zine draws from Roland Barthes’s concept of “punctum”—the insignificant yet poignant detail that captures the viewer—and Max Ernst’s description of collage as “the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.” Stemming from the two, I argue that to be a comparatist is to approach literary studies from this moment of revelation that is meant to have a personal, subjective meaning, and then replanting it in a different context.
Copyright (c) 2026 Cynthia Shin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Featuring artists who form a network of artists and survivors addressing sexual violence, We Will Not Be Silent: Art Transforming Rape Culture (WWNBS) was an exhibition at the Stamp Gallery at University of Maryland from October 30-December 15, 2025. The artists’ sensorial works, made from makeup, salt, clay, wood, fabric, and their own bodies, invited viewers to feel the realities of surviving, and confront the inextricable links between sexual violence, and the institutions that create it. These artists exemplify the ingenuity of resistance. Each artist’s work was displayed alongside their Monument Quilt square, a public art project by and for survivors of sexual violence made in the 2010s. In the spirit of art as activism, newly made banners by UMD students will be on view. Sensory experience was central to this exhibition, and the “catalogue” reflects this ethos. Instead of an exhibition catalogue, a zine with a digital, accessible version, carries forward the story and experience of WWNBS, as another piece of an activist archive. The zine includes images of the communal and individual artworks, framing them as remnants of a social movement, and part of each artist's body of work. The zine features original sources from the people who were part of this exhibition, narrating their artworks, processes, and the context in which they were made, including an essay by Dr. Kalima Young about Jdelynn St Dre’s work, an easy by Mora Fernández in conversation with Eva Salazar, and a final interview between this exhibition’s curatorial assistants, Gabriella “G” Warner and Rachel Schmid-James.
Copyright (c) 2026 Hannah Brancato https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Our zine is a guide for workshop facilitators who are trying to be power-aware, reflective and intentional in their practice. It is drawn up using the metaphor of a human nervous system, to ask: How can you have a spine & hold onto your values as a zine-maker, while facilitating a zine workshop? We facilitated a participatory action research process to respond to this question, and a gap in literature about zine-ing as a process within workshops—particularly in Indian contexts. Over the past five years, we’ve seen zine-making rise in popularity and witnessed them being co-opted. Our research aimed to reflect on and center relational practices, crucial to zine cultures, in our practice as facilitators. What happens in the room, in fleeting and messy moments of facilitation, often remains invisible in zine studies. The role of the zine workshop facilitator, and power dynamics given the medium’s anarchist roots, has not been studied in the Indian context. Our zine responds to this gap by using the metaphor of a spine to map what facilitators need before, during, and after workshops. Each “vertebra” reflects embodied knowledge: preparing, holding space, navigating disruption, and sustaining relationships. This zine is both a facilitator’s guide and a scholarly intervention—an iterative toolkit that reframes zine-ing as relational practice grounded in care, play, and accountability.
Copyright (c) 2026 Zinedebaad Collective, Riya Behl, Shruti Singh, Chetana Pai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
In the spirit of Mariame Kaba's Archival Activations zine series, “Citizenship and Liberation: An Analysis of Mid-20th Century Community Schools for 21st Century Organizers” analyzes two of the leading adult education programs of the mid twentieth century, the Citizenship School and the Liberation School. The Citizenship School aimed to address the material needs of African American adults in the American South. They improved students’ core handwriting, literacy, and math abilities as well as helped build fundamental skills required to register to vote amidst the racist restrictions of Jim Crow on Black enfranchisement. On the other hand, the Liberation School’s mission to was to teach the lessons of African American history extracted from dominant narratives through a curriculum rooted in the Marxist-Leninist theory of historical materialism. The hope was that the Liberation School would prepare a vanguard of Black organizers to usher in the qualitative and quantitative shifts necessary to radically reorganize society to improve material conditions for all working class people in a way the civil rights era of struggle could not and did not. Understanding the different ways in which the Citizenship School and Liberation School responded to the material reality of Jim Crow leads to a crucial research question: what can today’s organizers learn from the experiences of two of the leading adult education programs of the mid twentieth century? To explore this crucial question, this academizine explores the archival collections of James E. Campbell, Septima P. Clark, and Bernice Robinson as well as delving into the larger archives and the closed-stack library housed at the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture. This close exploration leads to the identification of key lessons to be gleaned from both models of adult education, specifically as they can be applied to the work of contemporary organizers aiming to create broad societal change in American society. These lessons are positioned within the liberatory cannon of Marxism-Leninism to provide added context and help highlight additional ways for organizers to think about their work in the present political climate with particular emphasis on the importance of incorporating the mass line into organizing work and thinking beyond the limitations of the ballot. The flexibility of the zine format allows for archives related to the Citizenship School and Liberation School curriculums as well as student and instructor experiences to be reinterpreted to fill gaps in modern popular education and improve understandings of movement work. The format also creates space for primary sources in the archives to become more engaging, accessible, and tell their own stories beyond the bibliography.
Copyright (c) 2026 Erica Veal, Nate Hubler https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This zine marks the launch of the ERC project Proteinscapes: The Political Geography of Meat and Dairy. During the launch, I live-drew each conference, summarizing the academic content while also capturing what was not said out loud by the panelists themselves. How does this process unfold? Sitting discreetly in the corner of the first row, my digital tablet on my knees—pencil in hand—I choose the drawing tool that allows me to write and draw simultaneously. A watercolor ink seemed the most appropriate: quickly handlable for fast note-taking and spontaneous sketches, perfectly suited to a fluid movement following the participant’s talk. The key words are efficiency and relatedness. The process might give you a headache, but it is deeply satisfying: I capture the main concepts and arguments of the presentation with one active ear, while simultaneously searching for the most evocative visual forms. I resort to multiple creative strategies—colors, abstractions, shifts in scale, and focal points—to follow what the participant emphasizes beyond the spoken presentation itself. Off-field voices, anthropomorphous scenes and characters—such as a talkative pig—or surreal symbolic assemblages—such as an animal butcher cutting salad—become ways of tracing the explanatory process of the talks while capturing the atmospheres participants convey, filtered through my own perception and artistic interpretation. Live drawing allows me to attend to what circulates unevenly in academic conferences: hesitations, affective intensities, moments of discomfort, or emphases that escape the transcript. While spoken interventions are shaped by disciplinary norms, time constraints, and hierarchies of expertise, drawing makes room for what remains marginal, ambiguous, or unresolved. Silences, side comments, metaphors, jokes, and embodied gestures—often dismissed as anecdotal—become part of the knowledge event itself. Academic conferences generate more than arguments: they produce atmospheres, alignments, frictions, and moments of collective attunement or dissonance. These dimensions are difficult to record and even harder to transmit beyond the room. Live drawing renders these ephemeral relations visible, offering a situated and partial trace of how knowledge is performed, felt, and negotiated. These traces were intended to be intelligible and shareable. The zine can be divided, with each autonomous page circulating as a trace of encounter that can be sent back to the participants. Showing the drawn page based on their presentation often opened genuine and enthusiastic conversations about their work, generating reflections on how research might be made more accessible to non-academic publics. Beyond the conference setting, this zine also served as an opportunity to experiment with creative tools and a sensorial approach that I am incorporating into my ongoing fieldwork. Currently, I am navigating the Azorean dairy landscape, sketching dairy production as an extractive regime that reorganizes female bodies and territories through techniques of control, care, and enclosure (Gaard, 2013). This perspective foregrounds how metabolic optimization reinvents persisting hierarchies: gendered divisions of farm work, the systematic subjugation of dairy cows’ bodies, and forms of ecological imperialism rooted in the colonial history of the archipelago’s transformation. The attentiveness cultivated through conference drawing directly informs my field drawing practice. In both contexts, drawing trains my capacity to register relations, atmospheres, and power asymmetries as they emerge—whether in academic debate or in everyday encounters with dairy infrastructures, animals, and landscapes—allowing these layered relations to coexist on the page without being reduced to isolated variables. The precarious and saturated dimensions of animal exploitation are difficult to grasp through textual monographs alone (Lorimer et al., 2019). How, then, can one move beyond the limits and dead ends of writing alone in the field? Visual methods can open ethnographic attentiveness as action-oriented tools to enact multispecies stories as “active technologies of worlding” (Van Dooren et al., 2016). Through the same technique described above, I report my own experience as an ethnographer, transcribing observations through the pen of my paintbrush. This immersive practice becomes a way of processing data, enacting thoughts, feelings, and atmospheres as they emerge from the research process itself. Painting the dairy cows’ gaze confronts me with what Kathryn Gillespie describes as the ethical demand of witnessing: an encounter that refuses mastery and instrumentalization. To meet the animal’s gaze is not to speak for her, but to remain with the discomfort of her irreducible otherness, vulnerability, and presence (Gillespie, 2016). Drawing, in this sense, requires ethical openness (Mannay, 2015). It implicates the drawer as both observer and participant, responsible for how relations are rendered and shared. This feminist multispecies position resists the extraction of meaning from animal lives and instead foregrounds attentiveness, accountability, and exposure as methodological commitments. I seek to transmit this sense of relatedness through future zines emerging from my fieldwork. This zine format, therefore, seeks to evoke: appealing to the senses and imagination to make academic contributions more accessible and engaging beyond academic walls. By combining ethnographic inquiry with visual storytelling, this multimodal approach foregrounds the sensory, precarious, and relational dimensions of more-than-human geography through creative forms of scholarly publishing.
Copyright (c) 2026 Eloïse Ly Van Tu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Much attention has been paid to the effects of generative AI on education, with growing worries centered on the evidence of students who are using LLMs to cheat on their coursework. However, we argue that the proliferation of AI-use among students has only exacerbated what the American educational system has long been cheating students out of: the guided development of their human creativity. It’s little wonder that living within a system and culture that demands rapid productivity and passive recitation of received knowledge has created students who view AI as a means of streamlining a workload that appears both perfunctory and meaningless. We advocate for a renewed pedagogical focus on students’ creative expression. The inherently social nature of zines makes them ideal for promoting connection and creativity in the classroom. We highlight some possible components of zine projects that, even if not explicitly presented as “anti-AI,” help counter its enervating and dependency-producing effects; instead, they decouple student writing from a focus on grades in favor of curiosity, multimodal communication, and self-expression. We created a digital zine with scrapbooking elements; we have included both a digital reading version, and one that can be printed. This zine contains our arguments, research, and practical suggestions for zine-based assignments.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jeffrey Canino, Gillian Friedlander, Deborah Tomaras, Margaret Roach https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Finding Zines in South and Southeast Asia
Asian studies librarians work in a multidisciplinary manner, collecting materials and exercising expertise across domains and genres, ranging from academic research to literature to popular culture. Several university libraries have large zine collections, as they can illuminate points of view outside of the mainstream, including information not created for academic consumption and narratives of people from marginalized identities. For an Asian studies library collection, zines add important linguistic, political, and ethnic diversity—but finding them can be tricky. This zine discusses the author’s process for collecting zines, taking into consideration power and cultural dynamics. Working with communities to collect their publications requires nuance and flexibility. I also discuss how students and researchers might interact with these materials, whether by creating their own zines, building communities online, or through more traditional research methods. Ultimately, this zine illustrates the changing state of Asian studies as a field focused on building and maintaining partnerships across the globe rather than extraction. The ways in which zines are collected for a university library can serve as a through which to view the current state of Asian studies collection practices, including how and why materials are collected and how users near and far can interact with university library collections.
Copyright (c) 2026 Zoë McLaughlin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
Keith Walsh: Weapons of Mass Instruction explores the intersection of visual art and political resistance. Through intricate diagrams and electrified maps, Walsh transforms suppressed histories into dynamic systems of knowledge, challenging the forces that shape what we see, remember, and believe. Drawing on traditions from medieval memory wheels to modern infographics, his work demonstrates how images do more than represent—they organize, produce, and weaponize knowledge. Each piece functions as a learning machine and a monument to possibility, reclaiming erased narratives and exposing hidden networks of power. This zine situates Walsh’s practice within a lineage of visual activism, revealing how design can provoke, persuade, and ignite social change.
Copyright (c) 2026 Mike Olson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Audre Lorde in the Hunter College Libraries
This place-based mini zine opens with a list of highlights from Audre Lorde’s lifelong connection to Hunter College, first as a high school and college student, and later as a distinguished professor. It invites current Hunter students to recognize their connections to Lorde and explore resources available to them via QR codes that link to curated searches on the Libraries’ website, where they can find primary sources, biographies, and theoretical analyses of her life and work. When the QR links inevitably stop working, the final invitation to visit the Libraries in person or online will always generate the connections that the zine was originally designed to foster. The idea for this zine originated as a collaboration with Student Life Specialist tanea lunsford as a way for the Libraries to support an LGBTQ+ community event and documentary screening celebrating Lorde’s birthday in February 2025. Following the successful screening, we collaborated again to host special visits to the Hunter College archives, which invited students, alumni, staff, and faculty to interact with materials created by and about Lorde in our collections. To make the experience accessible to all visitors to the Libraries, I have since installed a display of these archival materials, with the zine serving as an entry point to further engagement with Lorde’s legacy. ​As of December 2025, hundreds of copies of the zine have been collected from the exhibit, and hundreds more have been requested by student groups, faculty, and administrators. The evolving trajectory of this mini zine demonstrates the impact and versatility of this format for engaging academic communities, activating institutional memory, and making scholarship accessible in dynamic ways
Copyright (c) 2026 Dorian Onifer https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
The rapid rise of AI integration into our lives this past year has been startling. At all levels of the academy, educational organizations are announcing partnerships seemingly without any critical consultation or thoughtful deliberation. These expensive alliances are coming at a time of extreme budgetary contraction. Why are universities investing massive amounts in contracts with private companies when budgets are so tight? Who benefits? The call of “Will our students be ‘AI’ ready?” drowns out the more important question: “is AI ready for our students?” Research shows that Gen AI tools are often “confidently wrong,” offer up biased and racist responses, extract a devastating toll on the environment, provide venues for bad actors to exploit vulnerabilities, and harm critical thinking and analytical skills through repeated use/reliance. While some educators talk about “ethical use of AI,” we argue that there is no ethical use possible when looking at all parameters. Even before addressing the resultant systemic issues, the tools themselves were created using stolen content and are currently being argued over in 54 legal cases (and counting). AI “helpers” have been inserted into many products without a stated desire or demonstrated need for them. Are they actually helping? Or are they instead creating an added layer of obfuscation between a human and the information sources they need? In The Roots of this Tree are Rotten! we look critically at GenAI and give some options for how to resist, opt out, and push back on the narrative that “everyone is using it.”
Copyright (c) 2026 Carmen Mitchell https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This zine discusses a collaborative research project with a student that provided a foundation for successful zine initiatives in an academic library. Though the team at Binghamton University Libraries was aware of zines and zine-making on campus, we had little success with zine workshops…until we worked with a student on a research project for the entirety of an academic term. Our student researcher participated in the Libraries’ Research Scholars program in spring of 2025 to (a) find research on zines in academic libraries and curricula and (b) plan, host, and assess zine workshops. This work led to an expansion of zine offerings in our libraries, including building a teaching collection, a zine supply cart, and hosting zine-making workshops for classes. We are at a launching point and hope to pursue further initiatives such as zine collecting, expanding the types of tools and materials available, and additional outreach to teaching faculty. Ultimately, our goal is for students to feel empowered to create and publish through non-traditional avenues and to challenge the idea that particular topics and voices don’t belong in academic discussion. This zine outlines the research project and its results, gives suggestions for others beginning zine-making initiatives in academic libraries, and provides additional information resources.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jillian Sandy https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This zine explores how the art of comics offers unique ways of representing “the gothic” in graphic form. We look specifically at adaptations of the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the techniques comics artists use to represent the unseen, interior, often abstract or conceptual horrors that the gothic evokes. Unlike those physical, bodily horrors so popular in many modern horror comics and films, the gothic offers unique challenges and opportunities for artists. We draw on literary theory of the gothic and practical examples from comics artists who have adapted Poe’s works to explain the central concepts and offer examples of their illustration. Our main questions include: What does the art of comics offer to representations of the gothic and how do contemporary comics artists meet the challenge of conveying Poe’s unique artistic sensibilities in graphic form? We offer a few answers to these questions using a combination of collage, quotation, and original artwork. This project also offers a unique opportunity for collaboration between a librarian-scholar and a student artist, each bringing their own perspectives on the work.
Copyright (c) 2026 John Edward Martin, Sam Miller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
This collection of mini-zines proposes and performs bodies that are not bounded by the container of the skin. Our current (social) climate requires a conceptualization of an expansive body, such as a “second body” which connects an individual to each and every body on this earth, as proposed by Hildyard (2017). Worlds connect through bodies that are not whole. Scholars have challenged the one-body-one-person rule (Boll & Müller 2020) by presenting bodies and boundaries as leaky, permeable or dissolving (Shildrick 1997, Mol 2002, Hildyard 2017). I bring this conceptualization to bear on who produce knowledge, proposing an imagination of the body of the researcher as porous. But how does such a body feel? These zines are materialized performative imaginations that facilitate blurring boundaries, practicing attunement and feeling connected. Riso-printing allows for an exploration of transparency, layering, the blurring of colours, and a porous materiality (those who touch the original prints, will find traces of the ink on their own body). By disseminating these zines, I am bringing to paper the embodied knowledge of the butoh dance teachers I learned from during my fieldwork on butoh in Japan. My aim is to broaden the repertoire of porous sensitivities of those who read these zines— other researchers and anybody who benefits from practicing a porous body, attunement, or leaking beyond the skin of one’s individual body.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ulrike Scholtes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0