Selfing and Shelving

The term ‘zine’ covers a wide range small circulation publications with different aesthetic and material qualities as well as contexts of production and reception. They circulate in scenes, subcultures, niches and among marginalized groups and cover issues that find no place in professionally made media.

The Symposium Selfing and Shelving: Zines, Zine Media, and Zintivism brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss how zines construct individual and communal identities (selfing) and how these ephemeral objects can be collected, archived, and accessed (shelving). We are also concerned with the practical contexts of zining and the creative activist uses of zines (zintivism). Instead of focusing on one subgenre of zines (fanzine, punkzine, perzine, artzine), we consider zine media in the widest sense and hope to generate new discussions around the theoretical frameworks of zine studies.