Analog activism: Zine making in the age of AI

Zine making, an assignment rooted in feminist and critical pedagogy, merges creative production with theoretical reflection, emphasizing materiality, collaboration, and imagination. These physically tangible, handmade publications encourage participatory learning and community building while challenging digital ephemerality and rampant use of artificial intelligence. Students create original zines that connect personal experience to course concepts, fostering critical thinking, creativity, and peer engagement. The project advances durable skills such as communication, collaboration, and reflection. Through embodied, tactile learning, zines resist the passive consumption of course material and instead center originality, diversity, creativity, and human connection. Courses: Intercultural, Gender Studies, Rhetoric, Media Studies, Interpersonal, Political Communication. Objectives: Through zine making, students learn to research, select, and organize creative materials and construct original content related to course concepts.