Hello from the GEOZONe collective!
It’s been four months since we’ve launched the GEOZONe web archive, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the response from scholars, activists, and zine-makers from across the world. Since June, we have archived fourty-two zines with material from more than twenty countries across the world. This wide array of material demonstrates how zines and print ephemera can serve many different purposes for the critical scholar/activist, including grassroots knowledge production, knowledge co-creation, public engagement, research dissemination, self-reflection, fostering critical dialogue, and expressing bold manifestos — to name just a few. We’re looking forward to cataloging this growing collection of material, and we encourage you all to keep sending us your zines!
In addition to archiving, GEOZONe has begun to organize a series of workshops on using zines for research and pedagogy. We facilitated our first workshop on zines in the university classroom in September, and we are excited to share a link to the recording soon. In the coming year, we are planning workshops on research and knowledge disseminaiton with zines, collaborations with other scholar-activist groups working with zines.
This blog will document the evolving work of the collective, announce workshops and events, and highlight material from the archive. To inagurate the blog, we’ve asked each member of the collective to write a short introduction and draft a few words about one of their favorite zines in the collection. Read on to learn about the team, and follow our blog via the RSS feed here (via a RSS app or site like feeder) or our social media for more updates soon!
 |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wiley Sharp | Eden Kinkaid | Willow Ross | Nick Koenig |
Wiley
My name is Wiley Sharp (they/them). I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto and an uninvited guest on Dish With One Spoon treaty territory. I am the technical lead at GEOZONe, and I developed the web infrastructure for the archive. I am trained as a feminist urban geographer, and my dissertation research examines the urban histories of Toronto’s Bloor Viaduct and explores the racialized and gendered production of space in the settler-colonial city. Broadly speaking, I am interested in furthering dialogue between queer, trans, and anticolonial theory. I have written on feminist research ethics, the politics of translation, and trans urban research in the Americas, and I have forthcoming work on queer and trans countercultural scenes and place-making practices in Toronto. You can follow my work on my blog or my occasional posts on bluesky. When I’m not writing for work, I enjoy penning poems.
We’re privileged to have so many excellent zines in our archive! One of my favorites is the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition’s Universities and the Police. The zine is a call-to-arms for students to challenge the complicity of their universities in carceral violence. This project, shows how zines can function as a grassroots form of knowledge exchange through the ivory walls of the academy, and the coalition’s work in general demonstrates the transformative potential of a politics of solidarity.
Eden
My name is (Dr.) Eden Kinkaid (they/them) and I am a feminist, queer, and trans human geographer, currently at the University of Delaware in the Department of Geography and Spatial Sciences (but based in Tucson, Arizona on the lands of the unceded lands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui). My work in geography is wide-ranging, and includes topics of feminist geographies, queer/trans embodiment, gender and space, the philosophy/theory of space, geography pedagogy, creative methods, and the intersections of food, race, place, and development. These days, I am busy facilitating the Queering Feminist Geography Collective, finishing my book project on critical and queer phenomenology, and thinking about creative methods of geographic knowledge production and dissemination. You can learn more about my work on my website or by following me on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky @queergeog.
One of my favorite zines in the collection is Ruptures I by the FLOCK Collective at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. This is an amazing project focused on UNC as a racist and white supremacist institution. The collective researched the histories of racist violence at UNC, as well as the histories of student protest, assembled a bunch of materials, and created this zine to inform ongoing struggles on campus. I love this project because this is really one of my major motivations or aspirations for this geography zine project – using zines to produce critical knowledge of our tradition and our institutions in hopes of transforming them!
Willow
My name is Willow (she/her). I’m a cultural geographer and postgraduate researcher living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Based in so-called Australia, my research takes place at the intersections of waste, activism, and more-than-human studies — asking how ordinary people come to politicise the things and places we throw away like food, landfill and radioactive waste. This brings in discard studies, material feminist geographies, more-than-human theory, radical pedagogies, and critical anti-colonial geographies of activism and nuclear power. My practice has always been influenced by the people I organise with in food justice, environmentalism, Blak sovereignty, and trans/queer circles. Indebted to what I have learnt in these spaces, I use creative and embodied methods of zinemaking, material archives, and activist walking tours. I’m currently publishing research on dumpster diving and shadow places in Naarm/Melbourne.
You can find out more about my work at my website or follow one of the buried waterways walking tours if you’re in Naarm/Melbourne. I’m also on X at @willowrubbish and on Instagram but only if you ask nicely.
My current favourite zine in the collection is Solastalgic Energyscapes – but I do have to mention Santiago Orrego & Artem Pankin’s zine Rats as urban infrastructure (iykyk).
Nick
Hi y’all! My name is Nick Koenig (they/them) and I am currently at the University of Idaho studying for a PhD in Geography with the Idaho Tree Ring Lab and MA in English with the Confluence Lab. I try to write, teach, and research at the intersections between tree ring sciences in relation to narrative studies, critical physical geography, queer trans geography, anticolonial sciences, and the arts. My activist grounding is broadly within social justice community organizing with keen affinities for labor unionizing, divestment, food justice, and queer trans community-making. Currently, you can find me teaching climate sciences and sociology at the University of Idaho and feverishly working to finish up my dissertation.
While the archive has some of the most delicious zines I’ve ever come across, especially those around climate justice, my favorite zine has to be Professor Jared Margulies’s Welcome to Otay Mountain: An Alternative Field Guide. Through eloquently braiding together rare plants, field notes, and violent borderscapes, Jared takes the reader on a multispecies and political ecological journey to a highly contested region that reflexively challenges the natural sciences ideological framings of ‘field guides.’ I also have to give a special shoutout to the Beyond ESRI Resource Guide, such an amazing abolitionist tool for geography!