Mackness, Bell and Funes (2015) illustrate principles of rhizomatic thinking.
NOTE: This project was conducted as part of the CIS 668 (Social Justice and Inclusion Advocacy) class during fall 2023. This analysis and event planning in collaboration with Magik Press of New London, CT focuses on working class artists and zinesters. For more information, please explore the menu. On this page, I present the existing methodologies and school of thoughts that influenced my strategy.
My perspective as a researcher comes from an educational background which includes a government major with archival studies concentration in undergraduate, followed by archives and (community-based) librarianship for my graduate work. I am someone who focuses largely on political language, primary sources, and histories of humanitarianism when it comes to interests. For library and information sciences, zine libraries are well within the scope of existing literature. Many articles and resources include thoughts on acquisitions, teaching, cataloging, and circulating zines. Less of this work that is shared through academia comes from people who are not trained in LIS, but there is overlap for events and programming or items such as the educational zines made by the Zine Librarians Interest Group members. Because zine librarianship specifically expects collectors from all walks of life, my approach is inherently multidisciplinary. Community zine libraries can share the same struggles as some lone ranger archivists, even if they have what is considered a more traditional role otherwise. In fact, the two could be found at online professional development opportunities I’ve done over the years, such as the Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Collective’s unconferences (TPS Collective, n.d.).
In some ways, this prioritization of public interaction with primary sources crosses over into public history, which often finds cultural institutions of the entire “GLAM” field sharing perspectives. The National Council on Public History defines the field as sharing theory and methodology with so-called “regular” history but also “[u]nlike many historians in the academy, public historians routinely engage in collaborative work, with community members, stakeholders, and professional colleagues, and some contend that collaboration is a fundamental and defining characteristic of what public historians do” (NCPH, n.d.); galleries, libraries, archives, and museums all have their unique qualities and preferred practices. I hesitate to call them all best practices, as I remain critical of institutions even as they slowly right the wrongs of things like stolen items from colonized peoples. Because all of these spaces can hold art, even if not exclusively, I do not feel completely disconnected from the concerns of those who trust others to steward their work. However, places that hold exclusively art do not find themselves in my direct professional community often. If anything, it is usually the libraries of art museums.
For my theoretical lens, I am following the lead of my organization by consciously joining the process of rhizomatic thinking to promote both teaching and learning without focusing on the dynamic of student-teacher itself. Rhizomatic learning was coined by French philosophers Gilles Deleauze and Felix Guattari in their book "A Thousand Plateaus". Without knowing the words for it, I believe this is what draws me to unconferences, skillshares, and the like more so than large conferences, expenses aside. Rhizomes and the ever-changing map of connections we have are not limited to speech or language and lack an “ideal speaker-listener”. As illustrated by Mackness, Bell and Funes (2015) above, the six principles of rhizomatic thinking for pedagogy are connection, multiplicity, cartography, heterogeneity, ruptures, and decalcomania. For Aly’s everchanging personal map of the professional and personal, they explain on page 2 of their thesis zine entitled "Call & Response: a Collection of Essays": “As a multimedia, multidisciplinary queer feminist artist I have developed a practice of informal, informational material gathering that becomes an active rhizomatic map for personal, creative inquiry. As a Teaching Activist Artist I hope to share the ‘map-making’ studio process with my students. My goal is that each student feels agency to design a personalized map that can include any or all of their overlapping identities.”
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy references Jacques Derrida as a well known post-structuralist, which is also what the work of Deleuze and Guattari is categorized as. Some of my first archival theory reading included Derrida, so I am not surprised that I’ve been brought back to this school of thought as my work with archives and libraries continues. The encyclopedia states these “critiques of structuralism typically challenge the assumption that systems are self-sufficient structures and question the possibility of the precise definitions on which systems of knowledge must be based (Gutting, 2016).” I acknowledge that I cannot fully explain every part of most post-structuralist texts, and extended time must be spent with them. However, there is time to internalize and find connections to these readings well beyond time in the classroom.
Bell, F., Mackness, J., & Funes, M. (2016). Participant association and emergent curriculum in a MOOC: Can the community be the curriculum? Research in Learning Technology, 24. https://doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v24.29927
Gutting, G. (2016). Post-structuralism. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-N045-1
About the Field. (n.d.). National Council on Public History. Retrieved December 10, 2023, from https://ncph.org/what-is-public-history/about-the-field/
What is the TPS Collective? – TPS Collective. (n.d.). Retrieved December 10, 2023, from https://tpscollective.org/what-is-the-tps-collective/