Crafting Solidarities, Crafting a Zine

Methods for Resistance and Recovery in Higher Education amongst Doctoral Researchers of Colour

Authors

  • The Concrete Collective
  • Farhana Ghaffar University of Cambridge
  • Madhuri Kamtam University of East Anglia
  • Touseef Mir SOAS
  • Linda-Marie Nakibuuka University of East Anglia
  • Esther Priyadharshini University of East Anglia
  • Kavita Ramakrishnan University of East Anglia
  • Abigail Martinez Renteria University of East Anglia
  • Teemol Thomas University of East Anglia
  • Qingru Wang Hainan University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v23i5.2308

Keywords:

belonging, higher education, zine, solidarity, doctoral, underrepresented students

Abstract

How does the process of producing a zine contribute to resistance and action to create new spaces of solidarity? This article reflects on such a process to account for the experiences of the ‘Concrete Collective,’ a research collective of staff and doctoral researchers of colour. The project was initiated to understand what 'belonging' can mean, or fail to mean, when inhabiting the spaces of UK Higher Education (HE). A key output of this project was our co-produced zine, which became a means to express the collective’s distinctive journeys through HE and experiences of (un)belonging within and beyond the university. In this article, we reflect on how we worked to create a safe space within the institution and how arts-based making practices were central to expressing experiences not easily communicated through more traditional methods; using these collaborative and creative methods generated learning encounters, producing not only material for the zine but a new sense of community beyond the institutionalized spaces available within a university. The act of crafting the zine went together with learning to imagine, understand, think, and feel as a collective. We explore how the physical and political act of zine-ing provided a space to collectively critique and resist isolationist tendencies that create a sense of unbelonging amongst historically under-represented groups within HE. This act of creation allowed us to critically reflect on the dynamics of how solidarities may be produced. Finally, we reflect on the possibilities of nurturing and sustaining solidarities and collective spaces while carefully attending to hierarchical relationships present within the university.

References

Advance HE. 2021. Statement on the Higher Education Staff Statistics 2019-20. https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/news-and-views/statement-higher-education-staff-statistics-2019-20

Ahmed, Sara. 2007. "'You End Up Doing the Document Rather than Doing the Doing': Diversity, Race Equality and the Politics of Documentation," Ethnic and Racial Studies 30(4): 590-609.

Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Akhtar, Farhana. 2022. "The Emotional Labour of Decolonising Social Work Curricula," Journal of Social Work Practice 37(3): 297-308.

Allen, Douglas L. 2020. "Black Geographies of Respite: Relief, Recuperation and Resonance at Florida A&M University," Antipode 52(6): 1563-1582.

Bagelman, Jennifer Jean, and Carly Bagelman. 2016. "Zines: Crafting Change and Repurposing the Neoliberal University," ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 15(2): 365-392.

Bayley, Annouchka. 2018. Posthuman Pedagogy in Practice: Arts Based Approaches for Developing Participatory Futures. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Berg, Lawrence, D., Edward H. Huijbens, and Henrik Gutzon Larson. 2016. "Producing Anxiety in the Neoliberal University," The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 60(2): 168-180.

Chigdey, Red. 2013. "Reassess Your Weapons: The Making of Feminist Memory in Young Women's Zines," Women's History Review 22(4): 658-672.

Coleman, Rebecca. 2020. Glitterworlds: The Future Politics of a Ubiquitous Thing. Boston: MIT Press.

The Concrete Collective: Farhana Ghaffar, Madhuri Kamtam, Touseef Mir, Linda-Marie Nakibuuka, Esther Priyadharshini, Kavita Ramakrishnan, Abigail Martinez Renteria, Teemol Thomas, and Qingru Wang. 2022. Degrees of Belonging: The (Un)Homely University Zine. https://www.eggboxpublishing.com/product-page/degrees-of-belonging-zine

Dear, Lou. 2018. "The University as Border Control," International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives 17(1): 7-23.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Columbia University Press.

Doharty, Nadena, Manuel Madriaga, and Remi Joseph-Salisbury. 2021. "The University Went to 'Decolonise' and All They Brought Back was Lousy Diversity Double-Speak! Critical Race Counter Stories from Faculty of Colour in 'Decolonial' Times," Educational Philosophy and Theory 53(3): 233-244.

Dufty-Jones, Rae and Chris Gibson. 2022. "Making Space to Write 'Care-fully': Engaged Responses to Institutional Politics of Research Writing," Progress in Human Geography 46(2): 339-358.

Duggan, Lisa. 1993. "The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of-the-Century America," Signs 18(4):791-814.

FLOCK, Feminist Geography Collective. 2021. "Making a Zine, Building a Feminist Collective," ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 20(5): 531-561.

French, Jade and Emma Curd. 2022. "Zine as Artful Method: Facilitating Zines as Participatory Action Research within Museums," Action Research 20(1): 77-95.

Gastaldo, Denise, Lilian Magalhães, Christine Carrasco, and Charity Davy. 2012. "Body-map Story-telling as Research: Methodological Considerations for Telling the Stories of Undocumented Workers through Body Mapping," migration.ca (blog), https://www.migrationhealth.ca/undocumented-workers-ontario/body-mapping.

Gibbons, Andrew and Emit Snake-Beings. 2018. "DiY (Do-it-yourself) Pedagogy: A Future-less Orientation to Education," Open Review of Educational Research 5(1): 28-42.

Gibson-Graham, J.K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers.

HESA. 2021. "Higher Education Student Data 2019/20," HESA (blog), January 27, 2021, https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/09-02-2021/he-student-data-201920.

Holdsworth, Clare and Sarah Marie Hall. (2022). A Grammar for Non-Teleological Geographies: Differentiating the Divergence of Intention and Outcomes in the Everyday. Progress in Human Geography, 46(4): 1047-1064.

Housee, Shirin. 2018. Speaking Out Against Racism in the University Space. Stoke-On-Trent: Trentham Books.

Jazeel, Tariq. 2016. "Between Area and Discipline: Progress, Knowledge Production and the Geographies of Geography," Progress in Human Geography 40(5): 649-667.

Jewitt, Carey. 2019. Transdisciplinary Potentials: Arts-based Methods, Social Science and Digital Bodies. In Designs for Experimentation and Inquiry: Approaching Learning and Knowing in Digital Transformation, edited by Åsa Mäkitalo, Todd E. Nicewonger, and Mark Elam, 131-141. London: Routledge.

Jones, Daniel and Jennifer Jean Bagelman. 2022. "New Frontiers in 'Zineing': Zines as Process and Modes of Recovery." Panel presented at the Annual Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute for British Geographers Conference, Newcastle, August.

Kangas, Anni, Daria Krivonos, Inna Perheentupa, and Saara Särmä. 2019. "Smashing Containers, Queering the International through Collaging," International Feminist Journal of Politics 21(3): 355-382.

Lindhé, Anna. 2021. "Processes of Empathy and Othering in Literature: Towards a New Ethics of Reading," Nordic Journal of English Studies 20(2): 225-248.

Lonsdale, Chelsea. 2015. "Engaging the "Othered": Using Zines to Support Student Identities," Language Arts Journal of Michigan: 30(2): 8-16.

Malone, Karen. 2019. "Worlding with Kin: Diffracting Childfish Sensorial Ecological Encounters through Moving Image," Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy 41(1): 69-80.

McLean, Heather. (2022). Creative Arts-based Geographies: Some Cautionary and Hopeful Reflections. ACME, 22(3): 311-326.

Megoran, Nick and Olivia Mason. 2020. "Second Class Academic Citizens: The Dehumanising Effects of Casualisation in Higher Education". University and College Union (blog), January 2020, https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10681/second_class_academic_citizens/pdf/secondclassacademiccitizens.

May, Vanessa. 2011. "Self, Belonging and Social Change," Sociology 45(3): 363-378.

McLean, Heather. 2022. "Creative Arts-based Geographies: Some Cautionary and Hopeful Reflections," ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 21(3): 311-326.

Miah, Shamim. 2017. Muslims, Schooling and Security. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jena Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran. 2015. "For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University," ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14(4): 1235-1259.

Okoye, Victoria O. 2021. "Supervising Black PhD researchers in the UK: Towards Good Practice Guidelines". Royal Geographical Society - Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG) (blog), September 2021, https://raceingeographydotorg.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/report_supervising-black-phd-researchers-in-geography-v3.pdf.

Owens, Katheryn and Chris Green. 2020. "Performing Millennial Housing Precarity: How (Not) to Live Together," Studies in Theatre and Performance 40(1): 44-53.

Rogers, Amanda, Christopher Bear, Mia Hunt, Sarah Mills, and Rebecca Sandover. 2014. “Intervention”, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 13(1): 1-9.

Ross, Jen. 2017. "Speculative Method in Digital Education Research," Learning, Media and Technology 42(2): 214-229.

Rousell, David, and Anna Hickey-Moody. 2021. Speculative and Symbolic Forms of Expression: New Practices in Community Arts Education. In: Debates in Art and Design Education, edited by Nicholas Addison and Lesley Burgess. London: Routledge.

Sou, Gemma, and Sarah Marie Hall. 2023. “Comics and Zines for Creative Research Impact: Ethics, Politics and Praxis in Geographical Research,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 22(1): 817-841.

Shain, Farzana, Ümit Kemal Yildiz, Veronica Poku, and Bulent Gokay. 2021. "From Silence to 'Strategic Advancement': Institutional Responses to 'Decolonising' in Higher Education in England," Teaching in Higher Education 26(7-8): 920-936.

Turner, Jennifer. 2014. “Impact for Postgraduates”, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 13(1): 52-55.

Velasco, Gabriella, Caroline Faria, and Jayme Walenta. 2020. "Imagining Environmental Justice 'Across the Street': Zine-making as Creative Feminist Geographic Method," GeoHumanities 6(2): 347-370.

Downloads

Published

2024-11-11

How to Cite

The Concrete Collective, Ghaffar, F., Kamtam, M., Mir, T., Nakibuuka, L.-M., Priyadharshini, E., … Wang, Q. (2024). Crafting Solidarities, Crafting a Zine: Methods for Resistance and Recovery in Higher Education amongst Doctoral Researchers of Colour. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 23(5), 310–337. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v23i5.2308