{"id":1718,"date":"2026-08-30T20:36:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T20:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kwalon.nl\/?p=1718"},"modified":"2026-08-30T20:36:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T20:36:39","slug":"","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kwalon.nl\/en\/2026\/08\/30\/about-a-zine-making-workshop-a-students-struggle-with-meaning\/","title":{"rendered":"","raw":""},"content":{"rendered":"","protected":false,"raw":""},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false,"raw":""},"author":3,"featured_media":1720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_nl_post_content":"About a zine-making workshop - a student\u2019s struggle with meaning\r\nby Johannes Bartosz<\/strong>\r\n\r\nDuring my pre-master\u2019s in Human Geography, I set out to research how social infrastructure was perceived by residents of a Vinex neighborhood regarding social connections and wellbeing. Having just finished a bachelor's in Architecture and being especially interested in visuals and how they were treated in this new field of study, I added a further question: \"How can these 'invisible' concepts be made visible?\" In hindsight, I approached this from an objectivist standpoint. To the architect in me, creating visuals meant telling the<\/em> truth, and looking at visuals meant finding it. During the research process, however, I realized that visual research involves negotiating and interpreting meaning rather than simply revealing it. As various scholars have noted, I am not alone with this struggle (see Damon et al., 2022; or Van Melik et al., 2024).\u00a0 This blog reflects on these experiences with the opportunities and challenges of the collaborative method of \u2018zine-making\u2019.\r\n\r\nThe method<\/strong>\r\n\r\nA creative, visual method like zine-making combined my personal interests with contemporary forms of knowledge production while looking beyond what could be expressed through verbal explanations. My goal was therefore to create a small booklet that encouraged residents to see their neighborhood differently and creatively, while also producing an academic outcome looking at social-infrastructure from a visual perspective.\r\n\r\nIntroduced in the early 20th century, zines are non-commercial, self-published booklets embraced by cultural and political subcultures for the creative freedom they allow. Over the last decade, zine-making has also grown as a qualitative methodological tool. As a creative, collaborative method, zines empower participants to be experts and co-producers of knowledge and communication, creating a communal democratic space that challenges power relations between researchers and the researched, and allowing for participation and dialogue (Van Melik et al., 2024). Zine-making includes drawings, writings or collages, depending on the research but also the participants\u2019 moods, creativity, or bodily abilities. This can help alleviate what Kirsten Visser (2021, own translation) describes in another post on Kwalon as the \"pressure to hand in something creative.\"\r\n\r\nYet, this freedom was what made the project ultimately difficult for me: How can I facilitate this democratic productive process? How can I translate the various meanings academically? And do I even have to translate them?\r\n\r\nFacilitating the workshops<\/strong>\r\n\r\nTo carry out this method, six volunteers from a small Vinex neighborhood in the Betuwe met with me at a local library for two workshops. The facilitation process raised first challenges regarding my own involvement and language use during the workshops. Because I was interested in participant\u2019s views on concepts of \u2018social infrastructure\u2019, \u2018social well-being\u2019, and \u2018social connections\u2019, I wanted to avoid importing my own biases into the zine-creation. Especially, outcomes regarding lesser-known concepts like \u2018social infrastructure\u2019 could be easily shaped by everything I said or asked. Hence, task cards with explicit instructions (\u201cWhat should social infrastructure provide to the community? With 2 people: Create a mind map. You can be creative and use other materials as well<\/em>\u201d) were replaced during the preparation with more neutral headings like \u2018Social infrastructure\u2019, or \u2018Meeting Places\u2019, opening space to a more creative production and discussion process within the group.\r\n\r\nA core strength of the method is trusting the participants to be the true experts within a co-created democratic space. This meant trying to cultivate an inviting, creative atmosphere while stepping back from taking the lead later on. Thus, special attention was paid to the workshop\u2019s atmospheric surroundings and how the participants felt and experienced the space. Included here were the location and its lighting, but also coffee, tea and cake, and providing a variety of creative materials from which the participants could choose themselves.\r\n\r\nDuring the workshop<\/strong>\r\n\r\nAt the start of the workshop, I tried to encourage the participants to simply create, by cutting, drawing or writing. The only rule was: Implement your topic on the given sheet of paper. Here again, sensitive language-use proved important: because I thought that \u201czine-making\u201d would be too difficult to explain in my short advertisement in the local chat-groups, I had used the word \u201ccollage-making\u201d instead. Naturally, all of the participants looked forward to making collages. This was also supported by them working collectively, sharing the magazines that had the \u2018best\u2019 photos and helping each other cut and glue. Trusting them to \u2018own\u2019 the process generated a genuinely creative environment, but it also meant giving up on my initial ideas of producing various outcomes. And here, I began to understand that knowledge was truly co-produced.\r\n\r\n\"\" \"\"\r\n\r\nImages 1 and 2: Two different versions of \u201cMeeting Places\u201d<\/em>\r\n\r\nDiscussing the results<\/strong>\r\n\r\nLooking at the results, you might also conclude that \u201cthe pages are meaningful to the makers, but less so to non-participants\u201d (Van Melik et al., 2024, p.5). Therefore, another hurdle of zine-making is presenting the visuals to different (non-)academic audiences. For example, what does the circle of stones on the bottom right of Image 1 mean? Its creator and local residents may have clear interpretations, while you, the viewer, likely struggle to make sense of it. Capturing this knowledge and its production process in writing is difficult, since a written medium \u201ccannot fully cover the richness and discussion of the zine\u201d (Van Melik et al, 2024, p. 7). However, I wanted to create a zine that could lead people through the neighborhoods and make them think about social infrastructure. And academically I felt the need for some kind of explanation. This left me with the conundrum of giving meaning to the visuals while not over-analyzing the finished outcomes.\r\n\r\nTo help with this, I implemented the \u2018speaking back\u2019 method from Mitchell et al.\u2019s (2018) \u2018Critical Audience Engagement\u2019 (CAE) framework in which produced accounts are contested by both researcher and group, without changing the products themselves. Rather than asking, \u201dWhat do the pages show?\u201d, the CAE prompts questions like \u201cWho or what is missing?\u201c\u00a0 Together, we discovered that nobody had included the people who facilitated social infrastructure and reached some unexpected conclusions: The participants agreed on the importance of motivated volunteers, who had driven positive change in the village center. Additionally, we concluded that our group failed to represent local youth, missing their meeting spaces and mobility infrastructure. To me, these discussions proved more easily translatable to conventional forms of academic outputs than the visuals themselves.\r\n\r\nTo make the visuals more legible for broader audiences, the CAE asks further: \u201cWhat else would an audience need?\u201d Thus, instead of explaining the first round of pages, a second round of visuals can be created. Meaning is then not simply produced, accepted, and translated but rather negotiated between the group and the researcher. Because this takes time, I split the workshops into two rounds, becoming more involved this time to improve intelligibility and asking participants to bring photos of local places and incorporate them into maps. But here, my expectations clashed with those of the participants, and the democratic characteristics of zine-making workshops were made clear to me: when I asked participants to include social infrastructure on the industrial terrain we had discussed, I was met with: \u201cBut you said that this was our map!\u201d\r\n\r\n\"\" \"\"\r\n\r\nImages 3 and 4: Maps with photos<\/em>\r\n\r\nTo conclude, I want to compare my learnings to our education in universities. In Human Geography courses, we are sometimes asked to create visual outcomes like documentaries, booklets or photographs. But these outcomes are rarely allowed to stand alone, and we students are expected to \u2018translate\u2019 and incorporate our visuals into text, creating a single authoritative interpretation, our own. This was precisely what I struggled to let go of during my workshops. Yet, this textual interpretation misses what is most powerful and challenging when working with visual products: Visuals evoke different meanings for different audiences. While my objectivist self from the start thought that looking at the visuals was uncovering a fixed truth, zines prove the opposite: They embed co-creative processes and meaning that no single interpreter can fully translate. Thus, rather than providing an accessible outcome for academic interpretation, zines challenge scholars and students to find alternative ways to facilitate knowledge production and interpretation. The CAE helped me uncover meanings that were absent from the pages and unlikely to have surfaced otherwise. This allowed me to treat the zine as a product that could not be fully uncovered but that rather invites different audiences to discover their own meanings.\r\n\r\nBio: <\/strong>\r\n\r\nJohannes Bartosz is a master\u2019s student Human Geography specializing in Cities, Cultures and Inequalities at Radboud University in Nijmegen. He is currently writing his thesis about how Dutch policies on urban youth spaces construct 'youth' and public space as problems.\r\n\r\nReferences:<\/strong>\r\n\r\nDamon, L., Kiconco, G., Atukunda, C., & Pahl, K. (2022). Queering the Form: Zine-Making as Disruptive Practice. Cultural Studies \u2194 Critical Methodologies<\/em>, 22<\/em>(4), 407-419.\r\n\r\nVan Melik,\u00a0R.,\u00a0Kofi,\u00a0J.\u00a0&\u00a0Landau-Donnelly,\u00a0F.\u00a0(2024).\u00a0Studying and stimulating a sense of community through co-productive zine-making in public libraries.<\/em>\u00a0Area,\u00a056, e12960. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1111\/area.12960<\/a>\r\n\r\nVisser, K. (2021, February 18). Tekenen, knutselen of aan de slag met LEGO? Betrekken van kinderen in onderzoek met behulp van creatieve methoden. 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