Sometimes the smallest pages carry the loudest voices.
In an era dominated by digital media, handmade zines are making a comeback. These small booklets started as fan-made publications in the 1930s and evolved into a favored medium for countercultural movements in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. Now, they’ve made their way into classrooms at NAU, where professors are using them to give students a creative, hands-on way to synthesize knowledge.
China Medel, assistant professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, said these self-published mini-magazines take a personal and embodied approach to knowledge formation and dissemination by challenging dominant narratives through personal storytelling. She has been incorporating these creative projects into her classes.
“I’m teaching a class where we are studying different kinds of intersectional social movements,” she said. “Many of these movements are grassroots-oriented and coming from the people. I thought the zine would be a good format for students to do final projects. A final research project presented in a way that would be accessible to anybody.”
Since artificial intelligence has changed the way students write papers, Medel said a lot of her colleagues are asking students to show their understanding of the subject matter in different ways. Zines allow students to showcase what they’ve learned using words, images and creativity.
“My mentor, Adela Licona, wrote a book called ‘Zines in Third Space,’” Medel said. “She has a way of describing zines as a creative representation of information, and I think it is a great task for students, especially for a 200-level course. You ask them to do research, but in a format where they have to translate the theoretical broader concepts they learned in class into ideas with everyday language and visual language that might teach these ideas to others.”
Using this type of media for a final project also allows her students to present their research in a way that is different from traditional oral presentations.
“I wanted to move away from the oral presentation format for final projects,” Medel said. “I wanted to replicate the zine culture where people share their work through community festivals, where students would have a table, and people would walk around and ask questions about their projects. My colleague Carla Wilson does something similar with her class at the end of the semester.”
With this in mind, and since many of her colleagues in the College of Social and Behavioral Science (SBS) assign zines as final projects in their classes, the idea of a Zine Fest came to life.
Medel is reaching out to other professors who use zines as final projects to join this event and not only showcase the work of their students but also give them an outlet to practice career-ready skills they will need in the future.
“We live in a visual world, and students are really good at thinking visually and being visual analysts,” Medel said. “They can take the skills they learned from social media and put them in material form. A lot of jobs will ask them to represent information and do it in ways that are understandable to people. They might also be asked to create visual materials to go along with that information and to present them to others in a way they can understand them. It is a career readiness skill that students need and an opportunity to practice it.”
This first-ever campus exhibit showcasing NAU students’ DIY zine publications is scheduled for noon to 4 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 4, in the SBS West Foyer. Faculty interested in participating in the Zine Fest can email Medel.
Mariana Laas | NAU Communications
(928) 523-5050 | mariana.laas@nau.edu