Digital Anthropo-Zine Archive (ENGL 1102 & 1103, Georgia State University)

The following examples represent student-made zines–micro-publications that are often written with a specific community in mind, produced in small print runs or digitally, and distributed locally by hand, by link, or by QR code. Students started by studying the contemporary history of zines, which have been produced to communicate fresh or radical ideas to a given population, to raise mainstream consciousness about a specific social or cultural issue, and/or to connect diverse or emerging voices to new audiences. Then, they revised previous work from the course to create their own zines. These zines, as many zines do, employ a mix of critical and creative content to get their messages across.

In the first assignment, students researched and took an argumentative approach to an environmental problem, part of the larger “systems crisis” that climate change represents. In the second assignment, they applied their creativity and insight to the issues they wrote about for the first assignment. The capstone zine assignment asked students to compile their critical and creative work into an accessible, digestible format appropriate for a print or digital zine to be archived digitally in the library below.