Course Description
The 1990s riot grrrl movement in the United States and around the world empowered girls, young women, and others to write and illustrate their own lives and histories. The Riot Grrrl Manifesto asserts, "BECAUSE we must take over the means of production in order to create our own meanings." In this course, we will explore zines, which are self-publications that empower people of any race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and/or age to put their thoughts and feelings on paper. Using holdings from the Barnard Zine Library, we will engage in close and distant (i.e., computational) reading to explore the wide range of topics and styles represented in zines. Students will also create research-based zines, challenging the ten-page paper model of much of academia.
Learning Objectives
- Gain or deepen their understanding of zines
- Formulate their own theories on alternative means of exchanging ideas and demonstrating knowledge.
- Demonstrate proficiency with close reading text and graphics.
- Employ computational tools to perform textual analysis on a subset of the zine corpus
- Apply concepts from zines to create a well-researched zine that challenges traditional means of publishing, communicating subjective truths with passion, fury, care, creativity, joy, and rage.
Learning Activities
- Book chapter and article readings
- Zine making and other creative activities such as letter writing
- Textual analysis using web tools such as hypothes.is, Voyant tools, and scalar
Course Materials
Stolen Sharpie Revolution, 7th edition $10, will be provided
Other readings will be drawn from
Assignments
- Weekly zine assignments will be completed/not completed (throughout)
- The textual analysis will consist of digital visualizations accompanied by written analysis
- The final zine project will be evaluated based on research, boldness, and exploration of the form (final)
Syllabus review & collective expectations (2:30-2:45)