Historically homemade, zines have been a means of disseminating insurgent and subjugated knowledge, or knowledge that is not seen as knowledge at all. The Conversations piece in this issue is situated within the larger ongoing feminist reckoning with pedagogical philosophies and responsibilities and what constitutes “valuable” published knowledge. How do we think about the politics of labor and care involved in teaching and learning? What does it mean to rethink students’ “productivity” as we prepare them for our unjust world? How do technological shifts affect the politics of knowledge production and dissemination? And, of course, the ever-lurking question: how do we teach, learn, research, and study during crisis?
The dialogue between Elodie Silberstein and Susan Thomas that follows contends with these questions through the lens of “zine pedagogies” and offers three key contributions. First, the authors focus on self-published zines and their usefulness in coalition building and the sharing of survival strategies among marginalized communities during the pandemic and other crises and political upheavals. In so doing, they remind us that zine pedagogies are inherently feminist, not only because of the interrogation of the politics of knowledge but also because feminist pedagogies are crisis pedagogies. Feminist ways of teaching and learning are how we navigate both acute and structurally produced crises, if we understand crisis to be about precarity.
Second, the authors make us face the reality that in academia, we are not supposed to self-publish. Publishing remains the purview of academic or trade presses, which bring their own set of challenges, limitations, and politics. While feminist academics have found, and are continuing to find, ways to bypass gatekeeping (see basically everyone involved with the International Feminist Journal of Politics), this piece gives us a situated analysis of and perspective on how self-published zines can be used in women, gender, and sexuality studies classrooms as a part of pedagogical strategies to engage with the geopolitics of knowledge production.
Finally, we believe that the authors, an adjunct professor and an academic librarian, compel us to think about the understated and undertheorized role of educators and librarians. Despite the number of articles about feminism in academia, we rarely acknowledge the unsung heroines of teaching and research: the support staff who are eminently qualified and prepared to guide us through research puzzles, epistemological encounters, and archives. We know of anecdotes, from our own institutions and others around the world, of librarians being the only people to take feminist academics seriously, of squirreling away queer literature (or at least knowing how to find it), of giving roadmaps to those who are not supposed to be in academia, of treating unpublished and self-published knowledges with the care and value that they deserve (see Acardi Citation2017).
Above all, this piece urges us to consider the role of feminist collaboration in the multiple forms of knowledge sharing and knowledge making.
The Conversations section is an innovative intervention by IFJP which aims to offer space and opportunity to make strong theoretical and practical contributions to feminist debates that do not necessarily take standard academic forms. It may include interviews with prominent or early-career scholars, practitioners, and activists; narratives and short stories; photo essays, artistic pieces, and poetry; film readings; conference reports; and other “non-traditional” modes of scholarly writing.
Interested authors should submit their articles via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rfjp. Please also upload a biographical note and five keywords. Make sure to edit it thoroughly for language and clarity, format it to correspond to the Taylor & Francis guidelines, and identify it as a submission for the Conversations section.
For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at: https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_conversations_shortcut.
Inquiries should be directed to both Conversations Editors.
References
- Acardi, Maria T., ed. 2017. The Feminist Reference Desk: Concepts, Critiques, and Conversations. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books.