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 connections between this project and my personal interests.
I approach this work as someone who was enabled as a writer thanks to opportunities around Connecticut as a teenager. I revisit this empowerment today primarily through the do-it-yourself zine community that exists in the area; I submit to zines when I have the time but primarily volunteer for zine events or use them as teaching tools at the university and professional level. I incorporate these interests into my professional work because I believe I would burn out quickly if I only focused on more traditional paths of professional development.
As I have some familiarity with small press interactions from a library worker perspective with growing acquisitions experience, I want to understand artists better. In this way, maybe art can feel more accessible to me again while also finding more joyful outlets for social justice work. While we do not always need to fit zines into academia, it is important to consider how and why we work with them in collections, both closed and circulating. My personal zine collection informs but does not dictate choices for an academic library or community archive. In "A Citation Analysis about Scholarship on Zines," author Anne Hays questions if and how zines became a worthy object of study and which disciplines tend to use them. The author examines 163 peer-reviewed article citations from 1990-2018 and notes how the interdisciplinary nature of zines extends to their literature: "Zines have value to scholars as articulations of identity—in the formulation of LGBQ, transgender, POC, feminist, and riot grrrl identities—and as articulations of the self—in the cases of personal biographies, ethnographic studies, linguistic analyses, and rhetorical expressions of identity formulation. Some of the lesser-studied topics that emerged may prove equally important to future zine scholars as examples of topics to be more fully explored: fashion, labor movements, HIV/AIDS narratives, film studies, math education, science fiction, and sports, to name a few." Critical analysis is increasing steadily and has a clear presence among topics such as feminist ideology, collection development, and music criticism.
Hays, A. (2020, 7 23). A Citation Analysis about Scholarship on Zines. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication 8(1) :eP2341. doi: 10.7710/2162-3309.2341