The cover of a special issue of Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship, edited by Spencer D. C. Keralis and Zachary Frazier.
Spencer D. C. Keralis and Zachary Frazier co-edited a recently published special issue of Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship. The issue, titled “Academizines!”, gathers research and creative scholarship from contributors around the world, and all of it is in zine form. Keralis and Frazier are, respectively, co-director and affiliate faculty of the Center for Digital and Public Humanities.
Keralis and Frazier concisely capture their editorial ethos in an eponymous manifesto that opens the issue. “The scholarly communications ecosystem is collapsing,” they write. “Hopelessly polluted by capitalist and neoliberal priorities for research and higher education, the trad publishing ecosystem is now toxic to scholars at every stage of their professional lives.” The manifesto argues for more imaginative means of production and distribution of academic scholarship, with more emphasis placed on achieving a greater volume of circulation than is often possible in “so-called prestige publishing.” Zines are what Keralis and Frazier offer as one solution.
Contributors to the special issue come from a variety of backgrounds, and their zines tackle a wide range of subject matter (to “level the playing field among contributors,” Keralis and Frazier “deliberately did not include credentials or institutional affiliations”). Some zines are about zine-making itself; others engage in disciplines such as autoethnography, zine librarianship, and more straightforward scholarly prose that you might otherwise find in a traditional academic journal.
Taken in its entirety, the special issue functions as a kind of survey of what zines make possible for scholars working outside the bounds of traditional scholarly publishing. “For us,” Keralis and Frazier write, “this issue is a celebration of our combined over half a century of engagement with zines as a creative form. We hope both our contributors and our readers find something here that challenges them, uplifts them, and from which they can learn and grow as scholars and creatives.” The entire special issue is free and available Open Access.
