Zine production with queer, trans, and non-binary youth and pre-service teachers pro-vides a DIY approach to knowledge production, and zines themselves, as short, powerful texts, provide ways of disseminating knowledge among the communities that they affect.
By employing participatory visual research methods, we highlight the ways that creative knowledge dissemination through zine production can promote youth solidarity and local and school-based activism by connecting youth and pre-service stories with larger audiences. As Jessie Lymn (2014) suggests, zines themselves have a “queer sensibility and this ‘zine’ sensibility can disrupt linear repro-time and space…and ways of making archives…[through] formal collecting institutions, bedrooms, do-it-yourself archives in social centers and cafes, scholarly publications and zine anthologies” (p. 1).
We see disseminating the visual products among youth as a methodological opportunity for the study of, and a contribution to the literature on, participatory visual research relating to dissemination of knowledge produced by research participants (Bur-kholder & Thorpe, 2019). Our work contributes to a way of disrupting the erasure of queer, trans, and non-binary youth within schools and social studies curricula by sharing their zines with pre-service teachers and community educators. We note that when the pre-service teachers and research team created zines in response to the queer, trans, and
non-binary youth-produced zines, they all centred the school as a site to support young people. However, the young people’s zines did not directly discuss schools. In this way, we chose to read and create in response to what we wanted to see, or the context that we felt spoke most directly to us, rather than focusing on the young people’s identified themes.
From this finding, we suggest that it might be useful to provide specific strategies in facilitating analysis, exhibition, and dissemination of the youth- and pre-service teach-er-produced zines to outside audiences (teachers, students, readers, policy makers). In reflecting on the ways that we did not really “listen” to what the youth suggested in their zines, we realized that the zines themselves might need to be introduced to other audienc-es by providing context and strategiaudienc-es to support their reading. We see our failure as pro-ductive (Nairn et al., 2005), as we have sought to address our own analytical preferences and thought through how we might move forward in disseminating these works. Having experienced this failure, we hope to make changes to our research design and facilita-tion processes by developing specific exhibifacilita-tion strategies by and for queer, trans, and non-binary young people to exhibit the visuals they made in order to delve more deeply into complex understandings of their experiences, rather than reading them exclusively through the lens of our own experiences.
In a SSHRC-funded project that Casey and Amelia are currently working on, Pride/Swell, the primary focus of the project is to provide queer, trans, and non-binary youth in Atlantic Canada with art supplies and prompts about their identities, sense of belonging, and community, and work with these youth, at a distance, in order to think explicitly about how their art pieces might be shared, exhibited, and disseminated with broad audiences in a deliberately queer-focused way. Moving forward in our collabora-tions, we seek to explore how diverse audiences engage, make-sense of, and are possibly moved to action from the consumption of queer, trans, and non-binary young people and pre-service teachers’ visual texts, including zines. As a research team with the goal of sharing queer, trans, and non-binary youth zines and art as an intervention to disrupt their experiences of erasure and minimalization in school and society, we still seek to do better at listening to what they are telling us.
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