Undutiful Daughters : Results of the ‘Gender, Technology, and Zine-Making in the Neoliberal University’ Workshop
by: Mihaela Brebenel & Megen de Bruin-Molé , January 27, 2020
by: Mihaela Brebenel & Megen de Bruin-Molé , January 27, 2020
On 11 March 2019, several makers, including Mihaela Brebenel, Megen de Bruin-Molé, Özlem Demirkol, Sally Grant, Jennifer McHugh, Eda Sancakdar Onikinci, Samantha Schäfer and Noriko Suzuki-Bosco, participated in a training workshop on issues of gender and technology, and the role of researcher, educator and artist in the current neoliberal university. As part of this workshop they collaborated on a series of zine panels. Materials used in the collages included arts journals, home decorating magazines, children’s activity books, cloth patches, and policy and support materials from Higher Education organisations, including Vitae’s ‘Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers’.
On 14 March the two workshop organisers printed a zine on Winchester School of Art’s Riso machine, collating material from the workshop with poetry and prose sent from the other makers by e-mail. Many thanks to Emily Blewitt and Wanda O’Connor for granting permission for their poetry to be reproduced (‘When I Think of Bald Men’ by Emily Bewitt, from This Is Not a Rescue, Seren Books, 2017; ‘Fugue State’ by Wanda O’Connor, previously published in DataBleedZine, Issue Two).
A hi-res scan of the original panels can be downloaded here.
The Riso printing was funded by the WSA Graduate School, and kindly facilitated by two undergraduate technicians, Alice and Harry. To save on printing costs the zine was printed on donated paper, which was, serendipitously, a vivid shade of pink.
The workshop organisers have reflected on the process of making this zine in the article ‘The Carrier Bag of Feminist Pedagogy: Zine-Making as Training in the Neoliberal University’, which has also been published in this issue of MAI.
You can download a hi-res version of the zine here.
WHO SUPPORTS US
The team of MAI supporters and contributors is always expanding. We’re honoured to have a specialist collective of editors, whose enthusiasm & talent gave birth to MAI.
However, to turn our MAI dream into reality, we also relied on assistance from high-quality experts in web design, development and photography. Here we’d like to acknowledge their hard work and commitment to the feminist cause. Our feminist ‘thank you’ goes to:
Dots+Circles – a digital agency determined to make a difference, who’ve designed and built our MAI website. Their continuous support became a digital catalyst to our idealistic project.
Guy Martin – an award-winning and widely published British photographer who’s kindly agreed to share his images with our readers
Chandler Jernigan – a talented young American photographer whose portraits hugely enriched the visuals of MAI website
Matt Gillespie – a gifted professional British photographer who with no hesitation gave us permission to use some of his work
Julia Carbonell – an emerging Spanish photographer whose sharp outlook at contemporary women grasped our feminist attention
Ana Pedreira – a self-taught Portuguese photographer whose imagery from women protests beams with feminist aura
And other photographers whose images have been reproduced here: Cezanne Ali, Les Anderson, Mike Wilson, Annie Spratt, Cristian Newman, Peter Hershey