In anticipation of the TRACE Innovation Initiative‘s next journal issue, How We Make, we propose a session on a low-tech public humanities project: making zines. Zines are small, cheaply-produced booklets often freely distributed and focused on non-mainstream ideas. Kimberly Creasap’s article “Zine-Making as Feminist Pedagogy” discusses the benefits of teaching through making zines due to “[t]he informal, creative, participatory character of zines” and the ease with which they are “passed from person to person by hand” (155).

Zine-making builds on the participatory nature of makerspaces and spreadable media while also opening a forum for questioning how and why we make. In this session, participants will learn how to make mini-zines from a single piece of paper, fill the zines with answers to questions related to making in humanities, and leave them around town to spark discussions of humanities in the public sphere.

Creasap, Kimberly. “Zine-making as Feminist Pedagogy”. Feminist Teacher 24.3 (2014): 155–168. Web.

(Emily Brooks and Shannon Butts)

Initiatives such as the creation of STEAM from the widely known STEM Collaborative (Science, Technology, Engineering, ART, Math) recognized that art and the humanities are irrefutably core components of any production of knowledge. The affects of art and aesthetics are not easily qualified or quantified so they become easily dismissed.

Yet, you know when it is gone.                                                                                                                                                         The project, the experiment, the writing, the building, the meeting feels… off, or less than. No one knows what it is and it feels wrong, but something is missing, a certain je ne sais quoi that would make it right. This proposed session will attempt to discuss and explain the inexplicable. Through examples across the humanities (science to art) we will try to tease out the aesthetics that collectively balance the senses of perception and emit a signal of ‘rightness’ to the observing  majority.

The focus and structure of this presentation/poster/session/?  is guided by a Question

(Are there people who don’t appreciate a good view?)………………… and a Joke

(Q: How many Surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A:Knock-Knock).

Proposed by: Marissa Selena Molinar, MA (Comparative Art & Archaeology)                                         PhD Candidate_Archaeology. University of Florida