The Unessay and the Zine: Attending to the Genres We Invite, Support and Exclude
Jason Loan
Introduction
Developing an inclusive and anti-racist pedagogy relies not only on attending to questions of grading or ungrading which is just one element of the overall assessment ecology, but also in attending to questions of the genres 1 in which ask students to compose.
If, as Tema Okun has illustrated to us, the “worship of the written word” and valorizing “only what is written to a narrow standard” is a characteristic of white supremacy culture, then the genres of communication and knowledge-making we consciously (and unconsciously) invite, support, and exclude our students from composing with are vital to anti-racist pedagogical practice.
In what follows I present the unessay and the zine as ways of working with your students towards a more inclusive and possibly anti-racist vision of writing and knowledge-making. The concept of the unessay functions as a framework, a context from which a variety of genres might be supported and emerge. The zine offers an example of one such genre.
Course Context
A Zine About the “Unessay”
This zine is about the unessay, an assignment originally developed by Daniel Paul O’Donnell and subsequently taken up by a variety of teachers.
Download and Assemble “The “Unessay” zine
How-to Assemble This Zine
Read “The Unessay” zine as PDF
Some Zines
A Manifesto for the “Unessay” as a Project Framework
“Unessay” Resources
- Fuck, Yeah. I “Googled It.” (“Unessay”)
Zine Resources
- Brown Recluse Distro
- POC Zine Project
- Queer Zine Archive
- SUNY New Paltz Zine Library’s “How-To and Webliography”
Zines in the Classroom and on Campus
- Dr. Carmen Kynard’s Zine as Syllabus for “A Third University is Possible”: Anti-Racist Pedagogies in the Time of Racial Pandemic
- Feminist Geography Collective’s “Making a Zine, Building a Feminist Collective: Ruptures I, Student Visionaries, and Racial Justice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill”
- Elvis Bakaitis’ Zines as Open Pedagogy
- Remember Carolyn Miller — genres are not simply categories of things or forms, but are social action. ↩
