Belonging: building a community of and through practice a cross-institutional Zine making workshop
Tuesday 9th July 2024 – Foundation Year Network Annual Conference 2024
This workshop was open to delegates at the FYNAC24, which is being hosted at the University of Lincoln.
The workshop took place in the PSP Gallery at the UoL and has been devised by Heather Connelly, Dave Eccles & Nick Wilson (University of Lincoln), Jessica Longmore and John Grayson (Staffordshire University) and Sherene Meir (University of Durham) – see image below.
The aim was to create a cross institutional zine on the topic of belonging for the Foundation Year Network.
John Grayson & Jessica Longmore introducing the Staffordshire University Zine Project
Zine-making is low budget, DIY means of publishing and disseminating ideas, formation and creativity. It is often used by communities, activists and artists to encourage dialogue and collaboration, through lo-tech image-making, collage and text. The process of making the zine pages and output enables a variety of voices, positions, viewpoints and expressions to be expressed and heard.
Sherene Meir – Durham University outlining her approach to creative methods in the Social Sciences
The session will begin with an introduction to the Staffordshire University Zine Project with Jessica Longmore and John Grayson, a project that was devised to introduce Arts Foundation students to each other and was born out of a need for student self-expression and belonging. This will be followed by Sherene Meir, who will consider the pedagogical use of zines as alternative format to assist students in managing the cognitive overload during the induction process, and as a means to create communities.
Staffordshire University Zine Project
Heather Connelly, Nick Wilson and Dave Eccles introduced the ‘Sense of Belonging’ exhibition providing participants the opportunity to engage with the work on display and look through zines made by students from Staffordshire University and samples from the University of Lincoln’s Library Zine collection, before getting stuck in.
Participants looking at Staffordshire University Zine Project
Participants were invited to draw upon these stimuli as well as our collective experiences of ‘belonging’ within Foundation Years, to use the materials available to make a page(s) that will be made into a zine.
At the end of the workshop, we spent some time discussing the experience of zine-making as a tool for thinking about ‘belonging’, as well as reviewing each others’ completed pages.
Following the workshop, we aim to compile pages, make a zine and share them with the Foundation Year Network, here on the Blog.