Zines are cool again. Wait - were they ever not cool? Doubtful. If your goal is to express yourself, share your knowledge, or generate community, zines are a fantastic way to get your voice out there. They can be a creative outlet, a place to organize your thoughts, an experimental practice, a hand-crafted physical item in an overly digital world, and a tool to criticize power. And while zines originally emerged in connection with underground movements and political countercultures, our current moment of zine popularity is being embraced, perhaps cautiously, by librarians and teachers who want to borrow the power of zines and zine making to encourage students to share their passions. Zines have become surprisingly fashionable in college writing classrooms, libraries have expanded to include zine collections, and teachers of all subjects have found that thoughtfully integrating zines into their courses can bring students closer to their ideas—and can help make classrooms into unique spaces for creative engagement and crafty forms of expression.
The one thing missing from our current conversation about zines in the classroom, however, is a collection that gathers some of the many good ideas about how zines can fit into modern courses and how teachers and librarians can do zine-making right. That is, a zine making project can’t just be plopped into any classroom without first considering why zines are the way they are. They have histories, politics, and cultural origins that mean zine production practices don’t always fit easily into every situation or teaching method. That’s what this edited collection is about: bringing together folks who have been making zines, curating collections of zines, teaching with zines, and thinking with zines. We want to hear your plans, stories, and theories for connecting zines and zine making to writing, critical thinking, literacy, informal teach-ins, and other educational practices.
Who is invited to submit chapters:
Zinesters, zine editors, writing teachers, librarians, and college educators of all subjects who have experience teaching with zines. We know that scholarly writing is not rewarded (or rewarding) for all people. Zine writers not affiliated with (or underemployed by) a university will be compensated for their efforts.
We’re looking for writing about zines that fits into one (or more) of these categories:
Pedagogy! Did you teach a successful class or assignment with zines? Tell us about it and describe your work in connection to past work (see below for more).
Production! Making-oriented essays. Interesting insights into zine making concerns, including all facets of production, printing, distribution, etc.
People! Concerns around building and maintaining zine community networks, collaborations, zine fests, organizations, etc.
Politics! Using zines to push back against injustice. Plus, the complications of zine collecting, archiving and circulation by institutions, citation issues, copyright stuff, publicity vs privacy, etc.
Provocations! Hot takes on zine making, community, identity, etc. What it’s like to make zines in times of crisis.
The what and how to submit chapters:
Submit your roughly 400-word abstract, with a chapter title, your name, a short bio (50 words) that could include your history with zines, and what category (above) you think your writing fits into. For collaborative chapters, please include a bio for each contributor.
Plan to write a short chapter—between 1k and 4K words; multiple essay styles are welcome, from academic prose with citations to narratives about zine making.
Don’t feel the need to explain what zines are or describe the history of zines–we’ll cover some of that in the introduction.
Consider that images are welcome, but you will need to make sure you have permission to reproduce them or that your use falls squarely in “fair use.” The collection itself will be available under a Creative Commons license.
When abstracts are due:
December 15, 2026
Where to send your abstracts:
Kelly McElroy, Associate Professor and Student Engagement & Community Outreach
Librarian at Oregon State University, kelly.mcelroy@oregonstate.edu
AND
Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Oregon State
University ehren.pflugfelder@oregonstate.edu
Please email us if you have questions about your potential submission!
The more academic bit:
Writing instructors have long found solace in teaching with the self-produced, small-distribution, amateur-aesthetics of zines (Alexander, 2002; Frazier, 1998; Helmbrecht & Love, 2009; Jacobi, 2007; Licona, 2005; Rallin & Barnard, 2008). Zines, an abbreviation of magazines (described by zinester and zine textbook author Alex Wrekk as “magazines without the ‘maga’”), had been through a brief renaissance in the 1990s, as part of a larger response to the corporatization of popular culture, and a feminist reaction—through the riot grrrl movement—to toxic heteronormative masculinities (Comstock, 2001; Licona, 2005; 2012; Nguyen, 2012; Piepmeier, 2009; Radway, 2011, 2016). Zines present opportunities to reconstruct audience, rethink the materiality of production, help students get engaged in their writing and research, and trouble the representations of authenticity so often at play in writing classrooms. Further, zines represent a means to introduce students to transformative production tactics that blur binaries and can be used to mobilize communities.
More recently, there have been advances in teaching with zines in composition (Aragon et al., 2022; Buchanan, 2012; Lonsdale, 2015; Scheper, 2023), theorizing zine archives (Culbertson & Lanthorn, 2021; Eichhorn, 2014; Fife, 2019; Giari, 2009; Honma, 2016; among others), and in technical and scientific communication pedagogy (Bacha, 2025; Bikmohammadi et al., 2025; Ross & Pears, 2022; Ross, 2025). Zines are being used by an increasing number of writing instructors and educators across curricula who see them as an engaging, low-fi way to help students represent and share their knowledge and help lift marginalized voices and perspectives within their classroom. These classrooms can involve composition and rhetoric, sure, but can also extend to writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines pedagogies (Brown et al., 2021; Cook & van Hest, 2024; Dantzer, 2025; Du Laney et al., 2022; Williamson, 1994; Yang, 2010; among others) and creative writing approaches (Bott, 2002; Cogan, 2004; Marshall & Rogers, 2017; Pollard et al. 2009; Sinor, 2003).
Why zines in writing courses? Well, they can help students explore topics in an informal, low-stakes way, as they allow students to express themselves, and their dialects, in ways not as supported by other genres. Zines are multimodal, engaging students with physical representations in a very digital world. They can energize hesitant writers through the process of writing, offering multiple pathways to knowledge or fluency. Zines can also be brought in to courses in order to help students develop critical thinking habits explicitly through critical making activities (Alexis & Rule, 2022; Faris & Holmes, 2022; Haas, 2005; Koupf, 2017; Luther, Prins & Farmer, 2023; Shipka, 2011) or simply to amplify engagement (Palmquist, 2020; Palmquist, 2021).
While previous books have focused on creating anthologies of zines, addressed zine curation for libraries (Bartel, 2004; DeVoe & Duff, 2021) or critically positioned zines in textual, aesthetic, and cultural movements (Bly & Wooten, 2012; Duncombe, 1997; Eichhorn, 2016; Farrely, 2001; Joseph & Sawyer, 2024; Licona, 2013; Piepmeier 2009; The Subcultures Network, 2018), there has yet to be a collection focused on teaching with zines. That’s where this collection arrives. We want to hear your best pedagogies for teaching with zines, whether that means you have students make zines as part of the composing process, help instructors by running zine workshops in their classes, or study zines themselves. You could structure your short chapter as an explanation of your pedagogical approach, a case study of your experiences, or an argumentative piece that explains how we could use zines to build community, engage students, or make good trouble.
