Making a Zine, Building a Feminist Collective

Ruptures I, Student Visionaries, and Racial Justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Authors

  • Feminist Geography Collective FLOCK University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v20i5.1918

Keywords:

racial justice, activism, pedagogy, university

Abstract

Generations of student visionaries have struggled for racial justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ruptures I is a zine produced by the feminist geography collective FLOCK, with contributions from collaborators, that highlights this history of struggle. This essay briefly introduces the process, themes, and motivations behind FLOCK’s production of this zine and highlights how learning about UNC’s history transformed the way we view our campus landscape and remade our relationships with one another. As we strived to illuminate the ways student activists teach us about our university, making the zine became an educational process for our evolving feminist collective. Further, as our collective has shifted and sometimes stalled in the years after we first printed it, the zine has travelled outside our circle and served as a pedagogical object for others. In the spirit of feminist praxis we reflect here on our collective commitments to creating and using the zine to subvert oppressive university hierarchies and also explore the difficulties in sustaining this collective work.

References

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Dimpfl, Mike, and Sara Smith 2019. “Cosmopolitan sidestep: University life, intimate geopolitics and the hidden costs of “Global” citizenship.” Area 51.4: 635-643.

Knight, Michael Muhammad 2015. “UNC Must Confront Its KKK Legacy.” Time. Available: http://time.com/3697578/unc-students-protest-kkk-legacy/

Levenson, Michael, 2020. “Toppled but Not Gone: U.N.C. Grapples Anew With the Fate of Silent Sam.” The New York Times, February 14. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/us/unc-silent-sam-statue-settlement.html

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Additional References

Babatunde, Omololu Refilwe Babatunde, 2019. “Black Liberatory Senses of Place: Creating From Abject Otherness.” Undergraduate Honors Thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Black Out Loud project: https://www.blackoutloudunc.org/

Chapman, John Yonni Chapman, 2006. “Black Freedom and the University of North Carolina, 1793-1960.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. https://dcr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent/uuid:2ad37fba-c082-4e69-9a16-135c73aeedc9.

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Zine Bean Collective. 2018. Dear White Friends.

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Published

2021-11-22

How to Cite

FLOCK, F. G. C. (2021). Making a Zine, Building a Feminist Collective: Ruptures I, Student Visionaries, and Racial Justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 20(5), 531–561. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v20i5.1918

Issue

Section

SI - Controversy in Anti-oppression Pedagogies (Guest Ed. Nicole Laliberte)