Zine Production with Queer Youth and Pre-Service Teachers in New Brunswick, Canada: Exploring Connections, Divergences, and Visual Practices

Abstract

Queer, trans, and non-binary youth navigate school spaces punctuated by erasures, silences, and oppression, and resist these experiences through solidarity-building, activism, and art practice. In this article, we seek to centre experiences of school and society as important spheres of inquiry through participatory visual research with queer, trans, and non-binary young people (ages 12 to 17) and pre-service teachers and community educators (ages 22 to 40) in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Using an intersectional lens, we consider how intersecting power structures—gender, race, class, and disability—produce unequal impacts in relation to school and social experiences in New Brunswick. Centring youth agency, we position youth as knowledge producers through participatory visual methods of inquiry, including the making of zines (DIY print productions). With youth and pre-service teachers, through inquiry into existing and desired school and social experiences, we seek to make visual the practice of intergenerational solidarity building through zine production.
 Keywords: participatory visual research, queer, trans and non-binary youth, pre-service teachers, zines

solidarity through mail-based participatory visual research: exploring queer and feminist futures through an art, activism and archiving project with 2SLGBTQ+ youth amidst COVID-19

“…Participatory visual methods offer opportunities for high levels of impact, participant engagement and social transformation as part of the research process (Mitchell, De Lange and Moletsane, 2017;Burkholder, Hamill and Thorpe, 2021;Kendrick, MacEntee and Flicker, 2021). Visual methods can make policy engagement more accessible-through a provocative photograph or one-minute video-by sharing media outputs amidst multiple communities.…”

“…6 Participants opted into each space, and some participants titled their works and offered an interpretation of the prompt through text. Some participants chose to archive their work on Instagram and Facebook as well as our project website, while others opted to archive only on our dedicated webpage or only for our internal research team to view (see also Burkholder, Hamill and Thorpe, 2021). Some participants chose to share some while others chose not to share any of their artworks.…”

“…We saw solidarities emerge in online spaces as participants and larger publics had the opportunity to respond to and comment on the art pieces (see Figure 3). The public nature of this digital archive encourages empathy and engagement on the part of the viewer, while promoting increased understanding of the struggles and joys of 2SLGBTQ+ youth involved (see Burkholder, Hamill and Thorpe, 2021).…”

“…To engage the Pride/Swell makers, Casey created packages of art supplies-paper, cardstock, markers, paint, crayons, stickers, glue, glitter and tape (see Figure 1)-that were sent to each of the fifty-five participants' homes, as well as to the research team. She also shared a short video about how to make a zine, which highlighted how she took up the prompt (see also Burkholder, Hamill and Thorpe, 2021).…”

“…Our dioramas imagined queer environmental futures. Our resulting co-curated archive of these zines and dioramas (see Burkholder, Hamill and Thorpe, 2021) teaches us about 2SLGBTQ+ youth's identities, activism, beliefs, friends, home, family, fears, strengths and futures. The co-curated digital archive of our artwork deconstructs, explores and affirms identities and functions to build solidarity during a time of increased isolation.…”