Making a Zine, Building a Feminist Collective

Ruptures I, Student Visionaries, and Racial Justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract

Generations of student visionaries have struggled for racial justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ruptures I is a zine produced by the feminist geography collective FLOCK, with contributions from collaborators, that highlights this history of struggle. This essay briefly introduces the process, themes, and motivations behind FLOCK’s production of this zine and highlights how learning about UNC’s history transformed the way we view our campus landscape and remade our relationships with one another. As we strived to illuminate the ways student activists teach us about our university, making the zine became an educational process for our evolving feminist collective. Further, as our collective has shifted and sometimes stalled in the years after we first printed it, the zine has travelled outside our circle and served as a pedagogical object for others. In the spirit of feminist praxis we reflect here on our collective commitments to creating and using the zine to subvert oppressive university hierarchies and also explore the difficulties in sustaining this collective work.