Month: January 2026

by Willow Ross

Zines are cheap, non-commercial, small circulation, portable self-published magazines popular in feminist and DIY (do-it-yourself) subcultures. Their beginnings are often located back in the thriving queer activist, dyke, and riot grrl scenes of the 90s, but traces of zines can be found as early as the 1970s in the nascent British punk scene (Creasap, 2014). Importantly, zines offer writers a ‘vernacular radicalism’ in times when control over communication and knowledge production is increasingly centralised and concentrated (Duncombe 2017, 6).

Scholars like Sou and Hall (2023) advocate for zines as a more ethical, slowed-down way of doing research and sharing results – without traditional academic gatekeeping (cf. Desyllas et al 2014; Chidgey 2014; Bagelman & Bagelman, 2016). Responding to these calls, geographers in the past decade have taken up zines with renewed zeal to organize for change, to contest our field’s complicity with systems of war and genocide (Geographers for Palestine 2025) and to critique trans-exclusionary tendencies in academia (Queering Feminist Geography Collective 2025). Scholars from geography, history, and the broader humanities are using zines to speak out about campus protest (Stop LAPD Spying Coalition 2023), abolition (slumberkitty & ephedrine 2021), anarchist food redistribution (Ross 2023), and radical methods for teaching and making learning accessible (Jones et al. 2025).

What is GEOZONe?

Emerging out of these recent trends, the Geography Zine Organizing Network (GEOZONe) – a transnational geography zine archive – came together in 2024 to collect and catalogue the zine-making efforts of academics in geography and to act as an archive for print ephemera associated with the humanities, radical organising, and critical left-wing politics in academia.

GEOZONe was founded by Eden Kinkaid, Wiley Sharp, and Willow Ross, with the later help of Nick Koenig. Inspired by other collective efforts to challenge the neoliberal politics of geography within academia (e.g. Mountz et al. 2015), we built a digital carrier bag (https://geoz.one) to gather and archive the creativity, imagination, and radicalism of marginalised geographers making zines.

At the time of writing, we have collected 81 zines in four languages from 32 countries, facilitated 3 online workshops on zine pedagogy, and organized 3 zine fairs for geographers to share and connect over radical zines and print ephemera. This write-up offers a brief reflection on our experience at the 2025 RGS-IBG.

The GEOZONe Zine Fair in Birmingham

In early 2025, GEOZONe packed our bags and headed to the AAG zine fair in Detroit, where we took a corner of the exhibition hall and turned it into a rowdy zine fair for radical, creative geographers to meet. Inspired by what we did in Detroit, members of the GEOZONe collective struck out to set up a micro zine fair in Birmingham. GEOZONe was invited by the Royal Geographical Society and Institute of British Geographers to run a miniature edition of our zine fair at their annual conference in August, showcasing work by radical and creative British geographers. In the UK, equally embattled by dwindling funding, hostile governments, and rising transphobia, marginalised geographers need spaces where we can gather and organise at conferences. We were supported in this endeavour by various queer and trans British geographers, the Bristol Centre for Environmental Humanities, and Australian Geographers for Palestine.

So we set to work. Willow, with the indispensable help of housing academic Priya Kunjan, ran the RGS-IBG zine fair for three days of the conference, offering a place to share zines and ideas as well as forge new connections among British geographers. During the week, we heard from radical and creative researchers who dropped off zines on agroecology, cultural geography and plant identification – as well as stories of censorship, surveillance and repression from recent conferences across Europe. Resisting these cultures of fear, we proudly distributed zines about Palestine and the IBG and IAG (Institute for Australian Geographers) positions on Gaza, making it a space – however small – to push back on the status quo of silence within our discipline.

We also shared the open letter to the RGS-IBG about the assault of trans rights in the United Kingdom and platformed Vickie Zhang & Ben Anderson’s edited collection, The Promise of Cultural Geography. Having these gave us moments to connect, outside of formal sessions and publisher stallholders, with geographers interested in topics usually underrepresented – or even ignored – at academic conferences.

Conclusion: Why Zine Fairs at Conferences?

Sharing our zines, with the encouragement of the CEH and many invaluable supporters, was a highlight of 2025 for GEOZONe and for me personally. Our experience organising zine fairs at these major disciplinary gatherings has taught us that a small core of organisers working with a larger, emergent collective can make other spaces possible amidst these gatherings. We are thrilled that our space within the conference became a place for peer education, mutual aid, solidarity actions, and for “nursing wounds, soothing aches, building each other up, [and] gaining strength to lean into the trouble rather than away from it” in the belly of the academic beast (Smyth et al. 2020, 870). GEOZONe will continue to experiment with the potential of zine fairs to support myriad efforts to transform geography and the university. Keep an eye out for a (big, better) zine fair in 2026!