The subject is "East Nine Zine Circle". ENZC is the project that was launched in July 2018 and is still active. The circle's base of operations is located at Higashi-Kujo, in the southern part of Kyoto City. Historically, Higashi-Kujo has been a residential area for Korean residents in Japan, but in recent years, the area has seen an influx of other multinational immigrants, as well as a youth-led labor movement and a disability movement. In other words, this area has become an attractive place of diversity and strength, where various minority groups coexist ― and sometimes collaborate ― in their activities. This new form of autonomous community building is a notable example not only in Kyoto, but also in Japan. Based on this background, ENZC attempts to create cultural expressions unique to this area through zines. I have been cooperating with this activity not as an organizer, but as a guest lecturer and facilitator. I would like to report on what I noticed and what I thought was important. The key points are listed below. (1) In the activities, ENZC focuses on having the Asian perspective in the overall zine scene. (2) Each participating member is aware of the relationship with Higashi-Kujo, (3) The circle activities are conducted with an awareness of the linkage with various other community activities, so that those are not limited to creating zines, but are actively engaged in learning activities that address the issues of the area. I would like to introduce these points in detail on the day.

(20 minutes)

Zine fairs and pop-up libraries will showcase many publications from artists from the Sinosphere, some examples are Booked in Hong Kong, the Singapore Art Book Fair, the See Saw Zine Exhibition in Taipei, the Taipei Art Book Fair, and the Kuala Lumpur Art Book Fair. By engaging in textual analysis of different zines from regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, topics such as “what is queer?” and “what is China?” will be interrogated. I would like to argue that, instead of receding zine numbers, there has been a transformation from their general punk character to a more queer character. Here, I move away from queer as an identarian and restrictive category and towards “the multivalent potential of ‘queer’ in forming disruption and negotiation with normative media imaginaries of desiring, being, and belonging.” Placing this research in the wider framework of queer Sinophone studies allows us to zoom in on the narrow intersection of what it means to be queer, part of the Sinosphere and the role underground print media plays herein. For zines as well, it is important to not only look at zines in Sinitic languages as many people who engage with the Sinosphere do not have one as their first language or try appealing to more transnational publics. This will create a more nuanced perspective of the cultural-ethnic-linguistic dissonance in the Sinosphere.

(20 minutes)

Radical Care: Embracing Feminist Finance zine bridges academia, creative industries, arts, and activism. By connecting situated knowledge with theoretical insights and design speculations, it aims to offer space not only for new forms of critique, but also new imaginaries, and through that an alternative to traditional forms of knowledge production.

The content of the zine originated at the MoneyLab conference organized by the Institute of Network Cultures in 2019. While the conference was funded by institutional research subsidies, the zine was made possible through cultural funding available to Amateur Cities, as an independent research and publishing platform. By tactically making use of these different dimensions of financial support, we were able to ‘fork’ the conference’s topic towards a more activist / radical / politicised lens: from the larger framework of bottom-up alternatives and experiments in digital economy to the specifics of feminist finance. In this way the zine served as an extension to the conference – rather than its documentation – offering a feminist reading of the event. Using a mix of experimental and traditional formats, the zine was a way for people who often connected for the first time at the conference to work through a topic together, reacting to each other’s point of view and find shared perspectives.

The distrtibution of the zine was envisioned as a way of creating connections on another level. For example, a ‘library card’ featured on it’s cover encouraged readers to share their physical copy with others and to reach out to the organizers when they find it. Even though the zine has been published two years ago, to this day we are receiving messages from researchers, initiatives, and groups expanding our feminist finance community all over the world.

The capacity of the zine to create new forms of exchange extended into its Twitter-based launch events during the first months of Covid-19 pandemic. In search of a way to facilitate an assembly of the globally dispersed community of academics, practitioners, activists, and cultural workers affiliated with this topic without ending up in yet another video call, we invited people to join a live conversation strung together by hashtags. Wanting to document the local examples, reading recommendations, thoughts and questions that were shared during these events, we turned the conversations into a bottom-up Feminist Finance Syllabus of sorts that can be seen as an add-on to the zine.

As a series of mutations, the different cross-disciplinary, cross-format, and cross-platform connections that we have experimented with while making the zine and the syllabus offer a potential ‘third-space’ where a community connected by shared values and interests can gather beyond disciplinary and institutional divides.

(Lightning Talk)

How might practices and strategies of zine making inform a more equitable and experimental approach to scholarly research? Should a ‘zine studies’ even exist? What can academia learn from zines? What might a ‘zine-ic’ research look like beyond the thesis as zine? What can we learn about access, distribution and collaborative approaches to knowledge production from zine networks? In other words, how might a zine studies stay true to the ethos of zines, foregrounding care, collaboration, radicality and access, and enact this ethos within an academic environment often based on competition, proprietorship and individual authorship. I will posit some of these questions as a way to think about the possibility a multidisciplinary zines studies might offer, arguing for a zine studies that could retain the focus of community, collaboration and discursivity that underlines zine practices themselves and that can learn from zine practices and the zine community to foster interdisciplinarity and experimentation within networks of knowledge production.

(Lightning Talk)

Zines can be a powerful tool in public health to make information more approachable and engaging. Zahra's child-focused zine aims to teach proper oral hygiene by utilizing public health communication techniques while also reaching adults through a complementary zine that will share ways for parents to encourage their children to practice effective oral hygiene and answer common questions.

(Lightning Talk)

In this session, Lauren will explore zines in relation to autotheory – an emergent term for works that blend autobiographical and theoretical practices – and will pose ‘autotheoretical zines’ as a new categorisation for zine studies. Lauren will also discuss some of the questions and insights that have emerged from her research and archival work on autotheoretical zines, such as: what is lost when ‘flicking through’ zines in search for autotheory markers? How do we conduct zines research whilst honouring the spirit and materiality of zines? And also, what do autotheoretical zines teach us about autotheory more broadly?

(20 minutes)

What are ‘guided forms of writing’? This talk will introduce and examine this term, exploring how the act of writing poetry, and in particular making poetry zines, can question the designated ways in which we are 'guided' to learn, write, and produce knowledge.

I will place zines in conversation with the many forms of writing that we are expected to use within everyday life such as diagnostic questionnaires, manuals, and textbooks. We will think about how poetry zines can offer a way of reimagining pedagogies by questioning how we are expected to learn. Yet we will also question the very assumption of distinctions in forms of writing to begin with, thinking about how the freeform or miniature nature of zines can also make expressing ideas difficult or how zine forms sometimes risk mirroring the restrictive mechanisms of everyday forms of writing.

(20 minutes)

In the context of persistent pain, self-stigma and external stigma are social adversities affecting people’s health and quality of life. We are presenting the recent work we have collaborated on: a small scale case study exploring the feasibility of using zine-making and zine-library as an anti-stigma intervention. The aim was to inform future research that would expand on such art-based approach to address pain stigma. People with pain were involved, first, to design the workshops; then, to consider how zines could inform future research. From a zine-library, patient advisors identified which priority groups intervention should target (e.g. other people with pain to tackle self-stigma, GPs to tackle stigma within healthcare), what impacts should be explored and how it should be measured at the multi-levels of the stigma construct.

Our presentation starts with a reflective exercise for the participants (e.g. how reading zines might (or not) have had a transformative effect on your own self-stigma construct and/or bias towards marginalized groups?). It then takes the shape of a conversation between Colleen and myself, from her experiences of living with pain and facing stigma to her discovery of zines as a way of expression and connection with others. Finally, we talk about the feasibility to use zines as part of a pain anti-stigma interventions, supporting future research.

(20 minutes)

At the start of our ‘Crafting Contention’ research project (funded by Wellcome), we decided to assemble zines we identify as Madzines into a new on-line ‘Library Thing’ catalogue.

Madzines are radical mental health zines usually created by people with lived experience of mental ill-health, neurodiversity and psychosocial disabilities that challenge how such experiences are lived with, understood and responded to. This brief presentation will describe how our collection brings these zines together for the first time and explain how it differs from other similar collections (such as the Wellcome zine collection and the Mental Health Zine library). I will ask what it accomplishes to assemble Madzines together in this way and highlight some ethical and political challenges. I will invite participants to contribute zines to our collection, and to engage with us in thinking about its future once our project ends.

www.madzines.org

Twitter: @zinesmad

Insta: madzineresearch

(Lightning Talk)

Beser is an artist and curator whose mission is to spread the zine culture as a zine maker, reader, collector and fanzine festival organiser. As a fanzine enthusiast, Beser, who works actively in Turkey and Austria, sees fanzine as an important form of production in his art practice. Deniz Beser will be sharing his existence as an artist in Turkey, a country where electoral authoritarianism is intense and free thoughts are blocked, the circulation of fanzine as an alternative underground media, the movements of the zine culture and his own fanzine stories and experiences in this presentation.

(20 minutes)

We can be a bit funny when discussing money around creative projects. When you’re passionate about producing zines, the reality of printing costs and the time you and those whose work you publish put into it tends to fade into the background. But to continue being able to create them, it's important to have an awareness of what it’s costing you.

Rhia Cook, editor of Potluck Zine will be sharing her experience with the financial reality of producing and continuing to produce zines. She’ll be discussing Potluck’s business model, one that’s allowed them to pay contributors, donate to charity and keep going through economic uncertainty without external funding. This isn’t about turning zines into profit-making projects- it’s about discussing frankly how to make creative projects like zines financially sustainable.

tukru is a non-binary weirdo from finland who has been living in the uk for 19 years (almost half their life) and making zines longer. they also run the long running Vampire Hag Distro (previously Vampire Sushi Distro) they are working on a zine about going home to finland in the middle of the covid pandemic because their mum was suddenly dying from cancer and they had to see her before she passed.

Sabrina is writing a novel in the form of a meta-fanzine – a fanzine, which is aware of its own artificiality. ‘Zazen’ is a socially conscious novel, which unpicks civil liberties, commodification, music, gender, race, and identity by using polyvocal voices and paratextual materials from the alternative scene(s) of the 1990s. Sabrina will explain her inspirations, the process of writing unique texts, and reading from ‘Zazen’ as a work-in-progress.

This talk revisits Chella Quint’s 2005 print zine Chart Your Cycle and zine series Adventures in Menstruating. It explores zines as inclusive analogue methods of menstrual cycle charting and addresses the value of zines for queer, accessible and decolonised inclusive public health messaging. It includes a live mini-zine making demonstration. Those who would like to participate will need one sheet of blank paper.

How do we research zine history? What can be gained by doing so? Two scholars consider these questions by reflecting on their current projects focusing on 90s distros and Factsheet Five.

(20 minutes)

A 20 min presentation about zine making as healing through feeling and knowing. Laura-Marie will talk about their autobiographical radical mental health zine functionally ill, which she’s been making for 16 years.

(20 minutes)

In an attempt to reach scholars, particularly those focused on digital projects, who may be unfamiliar with zines, Barnard Zine Library collaborators have begun building a collection of zine texts--a zine corpus, suitable for digital humanities endeavors. I will share our thoughts and processes and invite discussion on the ethics of working with digital/digitized zines when the original content becomes recontextualized in a larger body of works.

(Lightning Talk)

Zine libraries are places where knowledge and practice are shared; they are sites where community is established and built; they are physical and digital places of safety. This talk walks through the conflicted role of the librarian, the blurring of public and private collection, and the role of zine workshops as alternative pedagogy, landing finally on exactly why it is that we desperately need zine libraries in today’s society.

(Lightning Talk)

This workshop will cover everything from how to start, how to sell, how to manage money, how to advertise and how to navigate postage. It will also share tips for taking care of yourself in a historically unpaid role which finds itself somewhere between hobby and part-time job. They will build on zine distro histories of the past, and introduce new skills in the age of social media, pay apps, and e-commence web platforms. They will also cover different scales of work from a pop-up project to what is, essentially, a zine shop.

We hope this workshop can serve as an essential resource for prospective and current zine distro owners and be the foundation for an interdependent support network of current and new zine distro facilitators.