On this page I've gathered some ideas and examples to guide and inspire you as you start making your zines.
You should also look back at the materials that I've shared in recent weeks. The handbook and the zine marking criteria are useful resources. So are the Knowing Cities and Zines webpages from Week 4.
Things TO THINK ABOUT WHEN PLANNING YOUR ZINE
THE TASK
The zine is a misfit assessment. It's something that's new and unfamiliar. And because the zine is not an essay, a blog, or a presentation, it can be a bit scary.
But as you work on your zine I hope you begin to see how zines can make space for you to experiment with how you express and share your ideas, experiences, perspective and understanding. It may challenge you to think about styles of writing. It prompts you to think about communicating through images as well as text. Zines encourages you to think about an audience. Zines prompt you to think carefully about how you use and cite the words and images of other people.
On this page I share some ideas and examples to guide you through thinking about how you make a zine based on your fieldwork.
I've asked you to make a zine that shares the story of - or tells a story from - your fieldwork. Together the fieldwork and the zine pull together the ideas, methods, issues as well as the ways of knowing that we've been examining in class so far. A good zine will:
- demonstrate your understanding of ideas and methods from the course and your ability to apply your understanding
- share research materials you gathered, found or made during your fieldwork and organise these into a story
- demonstrate an engagement with zine-making and zine cultures in how you share the story of your fieldwork
SO WHAT?
What story do you want to tell in your zine? Why does it matter? Why would someone want to read your zine?
Your zine could be a story about a place. It might take a reader on a walk or a journey. It might share an experience. It could uncover ghosts or reveal untold stories. It could draw attention to things that tend to get overlooked or ignored. It could deconstruct or subvert some norm or expectation. It might be a 'how to guide'...
The zine gives you lots of freedom to think about how you might share your research beyond the conventions of academic writing.
Normally when we present academic research our writing is quote structured. An introduction sets the context. A literature review situates our research in relevant fields. A methodology tells the reader how you did the research. And then you get to the research materials and the analysis.
But a zine does not need to follow this structure. It can zoom in on telling the story of what you examined and why it matters. You should lead with a story, the significance of your fieldwork, and your argument. This doesn't mean I don't want to see evidence of thinking about ideas, methods or ethics. But these shouldn't crowd out the 'so what?' of your zine
IDEAS NOT ART
In your zine I'm looking for you to show that you understand and can use the zine form.
Zines are incredibly diverse. But some of the key characteristics is that they are 'do-it-yourself' and make use of visual materials.
Some zines are comics. Some share photographs. Others collage found images and text. Some include sketches, paintings or drawings.
You should be thinking carefully about how you'll use visual materials in your zine. Images you use should be more than just illustration. They should be a fundamental part of how you tell the story. I'd like to see you working with any images that you include, using them to build a story, an argument or do analytical work.
There are all kinds of tactics you can use to work on images. You could use juxtaposition to make a contrast or expose a contradiction. You can annotate images to draw attention and analyse. You could make a comic strip to narrate something that happened. You could make a collage to express experience, atmospheres or senses of place. You can use symbols, drawing, or colour to direct a readers attention and lead them through your zine.
But remember the zine is about ideas not art. So while I want to see you working with the zine form the task is about sharing your ideas.
A ZINE IS NOT AN ESSAY
Part of the challenge of the zine assessment is that it troubles many of the conventions of essay writing. And essay is something that you've done lots of! One of the risks in this assessment is that you fall back on styles of writing that you're comfortable with...but these don't quite fit the zine form or the style in which many zines are written.
When you're making the zine think about the following things:
Voice
Zines are often personal and political. They're written in the first person and share experiences, perspectives and opinions.
How might you use your zine to develop a distinct voice that is authentic to your experience. How might this differ from how you'd write about the same experience in an essay or dissertation.
There are opportunities for being more personal, more informal, more direct and maybe more subversive in your zine.
But even with this freedom in developing a voice you'll still need to back up you claims.
ORGANISATION
How you organise writing on a page in an essay is highly structured. Start at the top. Move left to right. Organise your words into headings, sentences, paragraphs.
But the zine allows you much more freedom in how you use the page.
How will you arrange and direct the reader's attention? How will you text work with images in your zine?
There are lots of ways in which you can organise your zine.
You might want to trouble with the idea of a coherent, linear story and argue this doesn't best communicate the messiness or the incoherence of your fieldwork story. You could have loops, dead-ends, tangles rather than a tidy movement from beginning to middle to end.
You could organise your zine as a journey. As a path to follow.
You might play with perspective. Zooming in and out of particular sites.
You might use collage or juxtaposition to emphasise contrast, conflict or contradiction.
TYPOGRAPHY
You should reflect on how you'll use typography, fonts and colour in the zine.
How might font and colour be used to grab or direct attention?
How might different typefaces introduce different perspectives or voices.
How could speech bubbles capture dialogue or specific voices?
How might the spacing or direction of texts do work for you? For example stretching or compressing texts might convey a speeding up or slowing down of experience. Whereas the direction of texts could convey movement or make connections between different elements in your zine.
CITATIONS
Zines don't normally have in text references and bibliographies. But this zine is an academic assessment and I want to see how you are using and attributing the ideas, images and words of others.
You don't need include a reference list in your zine. But I'd like to see you attributing ideas and words that you are using.
There are a number of ways to do this. You could use in text references. You could add footnotes or endnotes. Or you could be more creative. A drawing or photograph with a speech bubble could be one way, for example, of attributing a quote to an author.
EXAMPLES
In this section I want to share some examples of zines that have been made by students on the course in previous years.
In my annotations and text around the photos I'll try and draw your attention to how the students have made use of the zine form, images, collage, text as they share their fieldwork stories.
Visual communication
This first example focuses on the figure of the 'flâneuse' to draw attention to gendered experience of walking in the city.
One of the things I like in this zine is the repeated use of the foot prints. It's a playful way of guiding the reader through the text and it helps tie together the different arguments.
There are other nice elements of visual storytelling at work here. There's the use of symbols on page 3 to convey arguments about the 'man-made city'; sketches and maps that give a sense of sites and places; a jigsaw metaphor; a neat use of collaged images of Michelle Bernstein and a torch to draw our attention; and an effective use of monolithic colour in the Patriarchy in stone page.
The next example examines touch in the pandemic city.
One of the reasons I wanted to share this zine was to show how you might use sketches and cartoon strip panels to tell a story. In this zine the author makes effective use of hand-drawn sketches to describe and analyse how the pandemic has changed how people move through and share space in the street differently.
This zine also uses literary montage to introduce and put the words of other people to work. There's an interesting assembling and juxtaposition of quotes that set out the methods the student used in the research and zine-making. This takes us back to questions of citation and using the words of other people. But it also raises questions of how you ensure your voice and your stories remain in focus in the zine.
The next example takes the reader on a soundwalk around Haymarket Station and strikes to instruct the reader on how to hear ghosts in the urban landscape.
There's lots I could say about this zine!
First, there's an interesting organisation of ideas and fieldwork materials into the story or narrative of a (sound) walk.
It's also creative in how it works around the challenge of sharing and working with sound in a zine. Images and text to draw our attention to the soundscapes of the space. It also uses QR codes to share sound recordings.
This zine also makes effective use of visual story-telling. Images of ghosts, hands, tickets, stop signs, etc. don't simply illustrate the text. They carry the stories and start to perform the analysis.
Finally, there's some good interesting use of typography. Whether it's type that grabs our attention; copying the styles of tram tickets or s p a c i n g o u t words to communicate a speeding up of the experience of time.
COLLAGE
Collage is another technique that's often used in zine-making.
It might be tempting to see collage as just about cutting and pasting and arranging.
But collage is about encounters. It brings ideas into conversation with one another.
In the 20th Century collage emerged as critical art form that cut into images, and text. Collage breaks things apart and wrenches them from context. It appropriates things. But it also reuses and recuperates things, giving them new life in different contexts. And so collage can be used to change, deconstruct, subvert, or make new meanings.
In the zine above there's some effective use of collage to communicate the multi-species entanglements of the nature city. Collage is used to populate the urban landscape with our non-human neighbours. I also like the encounter between animal spaces and beastly places is told through the collage and cartoon-like sketch of the dog chasing pigeons.
In addition to the use of collage, there are a couple of other elements worth pointing out in this zine. First, is the repeated use of photographs arranged in a grid to provide a visual inventory of overlooked nature in the city. Second, on page 6 there's a nice visual play on the importance of perspective that suggests connections to the story of seeing the city from above and below from Michel de Certeau's essay Walking in the City.
The next example is a zine that tells the story of an affective experience of an urban place.
I like the way this zine makes use of collage to use and share how newspaper stories about attacks in a subway in Edinburgh shape how the space is perceived and experienced dangerous. There's a sense of how an atmosphere is produced and experienced.
There's also so good use of collaged images to communicate a specific affect - fear.
Something else that's worth paying attention with this example is how the zine has a distinct voice. It's informal. It's straight talking. And I think it probably better communicates how many people might experience and feel in this place than a more sanitised academic account.
In the example below, the zine about ruins, deindustrialisation and the remaking of urban space uses collage to tell stories of how Fountainbridge has changed over time.
This zine uses collage of various found images to tell stories of Fountainbridge's past, present and imagined futures. It makes use of archive images, adverts, newspaper articles, and cut up quotes to tell stories about the layering of landscapes in the city.
This zine is also playful in how it is organised. The reader is invited to reader it front to back from the past to future. Or from back to front by pealing back the layers of how the landscape is being imagined to find traces and ghosts of its past.
How to...
My final example is a zine that take the form of a 'how to guide'. The zine examines how the pandemic and concerns about spreading the virus have changed ordinary practices like crossing the road.
A key reason for sharing this example is to show you how you might play with the form of the zine. The zine clearly engages with ideas and methods from the course and makes use of the fieldwork. But rather than just reporting what the author observed during the fieldwork it performs the author's understanding of the ideas and analysis of their research materials by organising it as a guide that instructs the reader how to cross the road in a pandemic.
EXAMPLES
WHAT NEXT...
I hope these ideas and examples are helpful as you work on your fieldwork mappings and zines.
I'd encourage to read some zines for ideas and inspiration.
For example, you could go along to Edinburgh Zine Library in the City Library on George IV Bridge.
Or check out Broken Pencil. It's a quarterly magazine that reviews zines and is a good way of getting a feel for the diversity of zines and some inspiration for your zine.
Or take a look at some of the past zines from the course that I've left outside my office (228 in Geography). Please return any zines you borrow.
Taking a look at the zine marking criteria is another useful way of identifying what I 'm looking for in your zines.