Introduction
This collaborative piece records the experiences and reflections from a zine/arts-making workshop on climate justice education held at the annual planning and writing retreat of The Sustainability, Environment, and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Centre (Southern Cross University) which occurred in early November 2024 on Bundjalung Nation Country (so-called Kingscliff, Australia). Twelve members attended the workshop and collectively created a “zine” on the day. SEAE Centre members, who were the participants of the workshop, are working in a myriad of transdisciplinary spaces in education, including early childhood, arts, feminisms, education policy and environmental education. The zine-making workshop was inspired by our collective concerns and political commitments to climate, environmental, and planetary justice education. As Jafry et al., (Reference Jafry, Mikulewicz, Helwig and Jafry2018) and Lobo et al., (Reference Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024, p. 10) explain “climate justice critiques the unequal contribution to, and burden of, climate change around the globe between different regions, countries and communities, gender inequalities and environmental racisms, as well as highlights the wisdom of First Nations peoples.” Working in the space of de/anti-colonial and ecofeminist education, facilitators wanted to open a space to understand, collage and create manifestos, stories, poems, and art on climate justice. We were inspired by the idea of climate justice as climate careFootnote 1 which co-arises with Indigenous justice (Poelina, Webb, Wooltorton & Joy Godden, Reference Poelina, Webb, Wooltorton and Joy Godden2024, p. 29). We invited SEAE members to reflect on what this might mean for climate justice education and their own feeling-thinking – understanding these as interrelated processes (Fals Borda, Reference Fals Borda2015; Rodriguez Castro, Watson & Trayhurn, Reference Rodriguez Castro, Watson and Trayhurn2025) that are activated by making as a way to create space for learners to do their own work towards climate care (Biesta, Reference Biesta2017; Crinall & Newfield, Reference Crinall, Newfield, Koro and Murrisin press). We call this feeling-thinking-making-doing. Thus, zine-making, as a feminist pedagogy (Rodriguez Castro et al., Reference Rodriguez Castro, Watson and Trayhurn2025) of feeling-thinking-making-doing sought to open a space for creative “collective consciousness” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Webb, Wooltorton and Joy Godden2024, p. 26) about climate and planetary justice.
In the next sections, we contextualise this workshop through scholarship that informs arts pedagogies in environmental education and introduce zine-making as a pedagogy. At the core of the article, we present the full spread of the zine pages created during the workshop. The sections that follow are to be read alongside the zine pages, and present workshop reflections on the possibilities and challenges of zine-making as pedagogy for climate justice education that can be implemented at all levels including public education. Based on our experiences and these collective reflections following the workshop, we theorise that zine-making can be put to work as a playful and creative pedagogy; a pedagogy of productive rebellion, that can lead towards climate justice learnings and evoke moments of living for climate justice with care.
Arts in environmental education
Art-making has long been a feature of education and is increasingly being engaged to challenge normative perspectives in environmental education (Tereso, Reference Tereso2012; Irwin, Reference Irwin2013; Papavasileiou et al., Reference Papavasileiou, Nikolaou, Andreadakis, Xanthacou and Kaila2021; Barratt Hacking et al., Reference Barratt Hacking, Bastos, Hogarth, Sands, Dunkley and Wenham2023; Crinall, Reference Crinall2023; Crinall & Stanger, Reference Crinall and Stanger2025; Hankin & Hogarth, Reference Hankin and Hogarth2025; Lasczik, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Osborne, Malone & Knight, Reference Lasczik, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Osborne, Malone and Knight2024; Lasczik & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Lasczik, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). Fettes and Blenkinsop (Reference Fettes and Blenkinsop2023) argue that formal education needs to rethink its purpose and the way we teach since the current system reinforces the values that have led to much environmental damage, including anthropocentric ways of thinking. Lobo, Mayes, and Bedford (Reference Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024) further state that there is a “void of responsibility for responding to planetary justice” (p. 16) that exists in mainstream education. Indeed, “climate justice demands make a more assertive call for the transfer of resources for mitigation, adaptation and reparation from the privileged to the most vulnerable” (Lobo et al., Reference Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024, p. 10; Táíwò, Reference Táíwò2022). Thus, to work towards climate change education that centres planetary and social justice, we need to change how we teach and disrupt the systems in which formal education has been historically embedded (Fettes & Blenkinsop, Reference Fettes and Blenkinsop2023; Lobo et al., Reference Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024; Sriprakash et al., Reference Sriprakash, Rudolph and Gerrard2022).
A key concern in justice-focused approaches to climate change education and environmental education is how to grapple with the complex issues of the multiple crises brought by coloniality (Lobo et al., Reference Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024; Stein et al., Reference Stein, Andreotti, Ahenakew, Suša, Valley, Huni Kui, Tremembé, Taylor, Siwek, Cardoso, Duque, Oliveira da Silva Huni Kui, Calhoun, van Sluys, Amsler, D’Emilia, Pigeau, Andreotti, Bowness and McIntyre2023; Crinall et al., Reference Crinall, Blom, Williams, Wijeyekoon, Blom, Rowbottom and Rowbottom2025; Lasczik et al., Reference Lasczik, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). Indeed, when First Nations approaches are brought to the core of planetary justice, crisis is not something to be faced in the future but an ongoing condition since colonisation (Nursey-Bray et al., Reference Nursey-Bray, Palmer, Chischilly, Rist and Yin2022). One way that educators can grapple with complexity and transform education for Indigenous, decolonial, social and climate justice is through ontologies, pedagogies and arts-based methods that are regenerative and reparative (Sripakash, Reference Sriprakash2023; Crinall, Reference Crinall2023; Mayes et al., Reference Mayes, Villafaña, Chiew, Maiava, Abhayawickrama and Finneran2025; Wexler & Manifold, Reference Wexler and Manifold2025). Art can also speak to crisis more holistically since it brings together knowledges from multiple domains to reveal the social, cultural and political aspects of environmental and climate concerns in addition to the scientific (Boykoff, Reference Boykoff2019). Moreover, Hunter and Lobo (Reference Hunter, Lobo, Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024) show that arts methods and pedagogies can be used to teach “literacies of responsibility” in ways that interrupt colonial figurings of white apocalyptic futures and the representation and “language of climate crisis” (p. 71).
Arts pedagogies in climate change education and environmental education have facilitated critical, loving, wilding, rebellious, hopeful, intergenerational and relational learning with place-based ways of knowing and being (Crinall & Stanger, Reference Crinall and Stanger2025; Gallagher et al., Reference Gallagher, Balt, Cardwell and Valve2024; Hankin & Hogarth, Reference Hankin and Hogarth2025; Lasczik et al., Reference Lasczik, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Osborne, Malone and Knight2024; Lasczik et al., Reference Lasczik, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). Engaging arts can facilitate rebellious be(come)ing with, as (Crinall, Reference Crinall2023), and “in the world without occupying the centre of the world” (Biesta, Reference Biesta2017, p. 3). This constitutes a be(com)ing with that is different to control of learning. Co-composing the present can feel-think-do-make a future with local and global communities, society, and the planet Earth within the frameworks of relationality, affect, care, and participation that allows for difference (Crinall & Newfield, Reference Crinall, Newfield, Koro and Murrisin press). These respectful pedagogies leave room for rebellion and so are particularly important for facilitating climate justice learnings with children and young people (Barratt Hacking et al., Reference Barratt Hacking, Bastos, Hogarth, Sands, Dunkley and Wenham2023). For instance, Gadsden (Reference Gadsden2008) argues that the arts can link “students’ knowledge outside the classroom with the knowledge gained through the official curriculum” (p. 29). In other words, arts-based environmental education supports young people to attend to planetary justice in ways that acknowledge environments are entangled with their own social, cultural and political contexts that adults may not be privy to. As Hankin and Hogarth’s (Reference Hankin and Hogarth2025) narration of wilding pedagogies reveals, art also facilitates “multispecies moments” for children and young people to actively challenge anthropocentric and civilising processes in education.
Zine-making is one way that arts pedagogies can be applied in environmental education with regenerative and reparative potential – that is disruptive, rebellious, slow, and much needed in poly-crisis times (Slabaugh, Reference Slabaugh2020). As we aim to demonstrate in this article, zines provide a novel intervention in environmental education as emancipatory (Biesta, Reference Biesta2017) by introducing visual and textual art practices and pedagogies as feminist, anti-colonial and subversive praxis that can disrupt traditional educative spaces and logics.
Zines and zine-making as arts pedagogy
Zines are do-it-yourself (DIY) publications as booklets that are easily made, disseminated and reproduced both in print and online. The zine-making process often involves arts-making such as creative writing, collaging, and drawing. With a DIY ethos of subversion to mainstream forms of communication, zine-making dates to sci-fi zines in the 1920s – 30s. From the 1980s – 90s zines flourished under counterculture, DIY and feminist movements such as Riot Grrrl (Duncombe, Reference Duncombe2014; Todd & Watson, Reference Todd and Watson2006; Rosenberg & Garofalo, Reference Rosenberg and Garofalo1998; Kempson, Reference Kempson2015; Slabaugh, Reference Slabaugh2020). Zines also have an important history as a form of advocacy in environmental movements in the Global North (see Mantell, Reference Mantell2023; Smith et al., Reference Smith, Cartwright, Brennan-Lister, Brooks, Collins, Colson, Cook and Munnery2024). In research and education, zines have been used to disrupt hierarchical and dominant narratives and neoliberal academic expectations by prioritising non-traditional formats and forms, marginalised voices, and art practices (see Gray et al., Reference Gray, Pollitt and Blaise2022; Lonsdale, Reference Lonsdale2015; Watson & Bennet, Reference Watson and Bennett2021; Rodriguez Castro et al., Reference Rodriguez Castro, Watson and Trayhurn2025).
Zine-making as an intervention or disruption to formal scholarly writing, academic productivity and formal education, repositions authority, voice, and hierarchies – it is subversive (Gray et al., Reference Gray, Pollitt and Blaise2022). Due to the visual and tactile nature of art-making such as collaging, zine-making draws attention to materiality, embodiment and affect (Slabaugh, Reference Slabaugh2020; Smith et al., Reference Smith, Cartwright, Brennan-Lister, Brooks, Collins, Colson, Cook and Munnery2024; Rodriguez Castro et al., Reference Rodriguez Castro, Watson and Trayhurn2025). Thus, zine-making is not only a form but also a transgressive and generative pedagogy “both in its non-traditional embodied material form as well as in the critical space it opens up to “‘talk back’ to power” (Rodriguez Castro et al., Reference Rodriguez Castro, Watson and Trayhurn2025, p. 13; Hooks, Reference Hooks1994). For instance, Velasco et al.’s (Reference Velasco, Faria and Walenta2020) study of toxic poisoning in Austin, Texas uses zine-making as a geographic method and critical pedagogy to engage students in difficult dialogues, such as the need for more diversity in environmentalism, highlighting how critical race approaches – often marginalised in traditional school outputs – were centred in the students’ zines. Ultimately, zine-making, as a pedagogy, opens spaces to disrupt and be political, while often encouraging collaboration and self-expression in-place (Lonsdale, Reference Lonsdale2015; Slabaugh, Reference Slabaugh2020).
Like art in education, zine-making as a pedagogy can open spaces to question existing power structures and delve into complex issues such as environmental and social injustice through narratives and creative work that prioritises embodiment, entanglement, co-creation and place (Wexler & Manifold, Reference Wexler and Manifold2025; Mantell, Reference Mantell2023; Velasco et al., Reference Velasco, Faria and Walenta2020; Smith et al., Reference Smith, Cartwright, Brennan-Lister, Brooks, Collins, Colson, Cook and Munnery2024). In this respect, Smith et al., (Reference Smith, Cartwright, Brennan-Lister, Brooks, Collins, Colson, Cook and Munnery2024) argue that zines and zine ecologies “put environmentalisms to work” through its DIY ethics and aesthetics (p.20). The rebellious, speculative, experimental and DIY forms within zine-making open opportunities for environmental and arts educators to create political responses and engage in pedagogies that contest colonial, anthropocentric, patriarchal, linear and contained views of space and time (e.g. Barratt Hacking et al., Reference Barratt Hacking, Bastos, Hogarth, Sands, Dunkley and Wenham2023 on mosaicking childhoodnatures).
Disrupting academic writing: A zine workshop during a planning and writing retreat
It was a sunny morning as Laura and Chantelle – the workshop facilitators – laid out scissors, coloured pens, glue, art materials and magazines on a semi-round table, as SEAE members arrived at the retreat. With a change of plans, the retreat started with the zine workshop with 12 members participating. Some expressed relief at “slowing down” and not having to engage with traditional academic protocols and activities first. On the day of the workshop, the United States elections were imminent, the polls were leaning towards Donald Trump’s election win, and the news of the genocide in Gaza continued to enrage and sadden many of us whose daily lives and work are so interrelated with young people and children, the Planet, and minoritised people. We also met on beautiful Country surrounded by the ocean, waterways and bushland of the Goodjinburra people, one of the groups that make up the “meeting place” that is the Bundjalung Nation (Tweed Regional Museum, n.d.). As academics from a regional university with multiple campuses interstate whose daily work is largely virtual, this was also a time for us to meet in place. We share this context, because zine-making and arts-making invite us to attune to materialities, to place and to the here-and-now; it encourages spaces for rebellion and freedom, to feel-think through the complex and the ordinary.
The workshop involved a pre-reading of the text “Waking Up the Snake: Ancient Wisdom for Regeneration” (2024) by Nyikina Warrwa woman, Professor Anne Poelina and Aboriginal and allied co-authors. The workshop started with an invitation for participants to share with each other about what from the reading touched them. After some collective sharing, and a brief introduction to zine-making as deeply political with roots in feminism, marginalised communities and DIY culture (Rodriguez Castro et al., Reference Rodriguez Castro, Watson and Trayhurn2025), participants engaged with two guided activities of political collage from random art magazines and scrap paper, and creative writing as outlined below in Table 1. The political collage and writing exercise were intended to feel-think-make-do with climate justice in mind (see Table 1). We did this as an intentional act to centre the embodied and the political in our thinking-feeling with the freedom for participants of doing-making a zine for climate justice in which we did not act to control what was learned; what was taught. The free art-making session called participants to create and finalise 1–3 zine pages each. The workshop ended with a roundtable discussion around the co-created zine in which everyone shared their thoughts on the zine-making process and productions. Laura and Chantelle, who both engage in arts practices of collaging/zine-making and creative writing respectively facilitated these activities (see Table 1).
Table 1. Zine workshop activities
Reflecting and writing about zine-making as pedagogy
The process of reflection on the zine and zine-making workshop began in early 2025. Contributors submitted initial written reflections on their zine pages and the process in March. Many of these initial reflections were written as Tropical Cyclone Alfred (9 March 2025) and flooding was hitting South-East Queensland and Northern New South Wales in Australia, bringing close to home, for many of us, the reality of the climate crisis. From April to December 2025, we also met online (5 meetings), discussed and wrote together to reflect on how zine-making felt collectively, individually and in dialogue with climate justice and environmental education.
Then, Chantelle and Laura led the process of bringing these reflections together in drafts that were shared, rewritten and edited collectively. We followed play, wonder and collaging of the text in conversation as a method of writing and analysis to find connections, embodiments, assemblages. In the meetings and through article drafts, the participants were invited to “wonder” about the zine-making process (Maclure, Reference MacLure2013) – how they felt, what tensions and reservations emerged, what came to the surface, e.g. discomfort, productivities, when they met with the materials, and what desires shaped their curatorial choices. Thus, the writing for this article was a relational, embodied and generative process; when we engaged in reflection, things were folded in, arose and our original work took on additional meanings as we wrote. As Maclure (Reference MacLure2013), explains “we may feel the wonder of data in the gut, or the quickening heartbeat, as well as in the cerebral disappointment of failing to find the right code or category in which to park a particular piece of (what now presents itself as) data” (p. 229). As the reflective process came to an end, the pedagogical wonders started to “glow” (Maclure, Reference MacLure2013). As such, in this article, we do not approach the zine content and pages as data to analyse. Instead, we focus on the process of data-researcher zine-making, and its potential and limitation as an arts pedagogy for environmental education. We focus our attention on the potential of zine-making as a critical, playful, loving, rebellious and transformative pedagogy for climate justice education in poly-crisis times. In doing so, we seek to present this piece, not only as a collaborative reflection, but as a provocation for arts to invite environmental educators interested in engaging with zine-making to do so in and outside the classroom.
An affective, embodied, more-than-human and creative illustration of engaging with these pedagogies is illustrated below in Figures 1, 2, 3 and 4 selected zine pages of the article’s contributors:
FULL ZINE BOOKLET AVAILABLE HERE: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/8bb91b689b.html
Figure 1. Zine artists top left: Laura; top right: Liberty; bottom left: Aspa; bottom right: Lisa.
Figure 2. Zine artists top left: Chantelle; top right, bottom left and bottom right: Amy.
Figure 3. Zine artists top left: Marilyn; top right: Sarah and Olivera; bottom left: Katie; bottom right: Laura.
Figure 4. Zine artist: Alexandra.
Discussion
Through our working together, concepts emerged that spoke to the ways that our zine-making felt to be a pedagogy for climate justice education. In the following discussion, we collage and bring together these concepts following our wonder-full (full of wonder), creative, and playful process. We present these concepts to demonstrate that zine-making as a pedagogy escapes containment. Instead, zine-making “opens up” avenues through art-making that others can take up in their own contexts in ways that are rebellious, loving, soft, playful, relational, and otherwise.
Zine-making as playful…
Play and creative work has long been part of pedagogies, acknowledging that learning happens through experimentation and making (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles & Rousell, Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone and Hacking2020; Cutter-Mackenzie et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie, Edwards, Moore and Boyd2014; Gadsden, Reference Gadsden2008; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2023). As Laura (see Figure 3), illustrates:Footnote 2
Zine-making has become a refuge to create and feel-think through complex ideas, to engage with these in raw and imperfect ways. It has allowed me to end up with something that can spark a conversation and create a space for creative and collective consciousness. In this instance, I challenged myself to engage with creative writing and poetry as Chantelle guided us through creating a story.
Zine-making as a process to explore the unfamiliar,
to dare to create in other ways,
to dare to express our desires, politics, concerns and struggles otherwise.
Zine-making as an activity allows for pedagogies of play and creativity to facilitate learning in non-traditional, rebellious, loving and generative ways. If our aim is justice when current systems and structures create injustice, then pedagogies of play and creativity allow us do things otherwise.
In our reflections on the workshop, we spoke collectively of the opportunities that play and creativity provide for climate justice education. Zines offer enabling constraints for focused art-making. An enabling constraint can be understood as a limitation that is set to encourage innovative ways of making (Lasczik & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2022). We are given a structure and then asked to push at the boundaries of it (Lasczik & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2022) so although the activity was fixed, everyone was met where they were at. Far from the “empty” four walls of the classroom, zine-making brings us into conversation with materialities, with the more-than-human world around us and gives us permission to be playful, to experiment and for knowledge to emerge generatively in the process. Similarly, play allows people to explore (in a safe and controlled way) moments of risk, extreme scenarios and otherwise worlds (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2023; Turner-King & Smith, Reference Turner-King, Smith, Gallagher and Balt2024). Creative and playful pedagogies provide people with a sense of agency as they make and enact their imaginaries, and this process can work to ease them into difficult and challenging topics such as climate injustice (Turner-King et al., Reference Turner-King, Smith, Gallagher and Balt2024). The accessibility of zine-making as well as providing a space for us to freely express ourselves, offered a way in as Laura says “to feel-think through” climate justice.
Zine-making as a gentle way in…
One concept that arose from the reflections was that zine-making offered a way in – to feel-think, to make, and to become. We spoke about the lightness of zine-making when we come to feel-think through heavy topics. Meehan (Reference Meehan, Atkinson and Ray2024) argues that “pleasant emotions broaden what we’re willing to think and do,” that joyful work can build our capabilities, and that “while pleasant emotions are temporary, the resources they build are durable” (p. 223). Therefore, the joy of creative practice can help to counter feelings of anxiety and increase our abilities to feel-think through. This was apparent in Katie’s (see Figure 3) reflection:
I always feel a little out of my depth in conversations about climate change and environmental education. I have never been actively involved in scientific things and have often wanted to bury my head in the sand about all the awful things in the world. I think it is why I am drawn to beautiful, colourful things. So, when given this prompt to consider climate justice education, I needed to really concentrate, to tap into an area that does make me uncomfortable. I deliberately chose to trust the process of marking art (McNiff, Reference McNiff1998), slowing down (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, Reference Lasczik Cutcher and Irwin2017) to notice the colours, images and words presented to me in the form of a table full of magazines and collage materials.
As Katie alludes, zine-making provided a gentle way into feeling and thinking about climate justice through joyful creation.
Zine-making as connection…
If climate justice education should be based on interconnectedness, hadn’t we better start on our practice as interconnected researchers?
Lisa’s important question asks us to reconsider the pedagogy of zine-making and how co-creative practices could be activated. Our reflections show the ways we each grappled with concepts of connection and disconnection in the making process, drawing on theory from our diverse backgrounds to explain the impact. Through this feeling – thinking we find openings for relational pedagogies to emerge. In many of the reflections, there were comments about collectivity and collaboration. In the zine-making process, we expressed a desire to unsettle ideas of the singular maker, as Laura suggests:
I have been zine-making collectively for the past 8 years. It is in this process of coming together, of creating together, of reflecting alongside each other, of chit-chats while collaging, of creating through complex issues (instead of only writing about it in confined ways) that I have found those moments of “collective consciousness” (Poelina et al., Reference Poelina, Webb, Wooltorton and Joy Godden2024).
For Katie, it was in this collective space that she was prompted and influenced in her making:
The collaborative nature of the workshop highlighted the importance of diverse perspectives in addressing climate issues. Engaging with others and sharing ideas enriched my understanding of climate justice and inspired me to think more creatively about solutions.
My zine page is a visual representation of the need to slow down and listen to and act on scientific evidence to achieve climate justice.
However, Lisa’s provocation also challenges us to go further, to not just share ideas but share in the making as she explains:
Thinking and critiquing the particular way we enacted this practice… I question two aspects of the zine-making, which are interwoven.
The first is the “making as an individual”. Did it occur to any of us to collaborate on a page? Would that have been accepted? Of course many pages are needed to make a whole zine, but it occurred to me as I read through the zine, that while each page is beautiful and interesting and thought-provoking, they do not flow as a connected whole. The second aspect is the “making in silence” which obviously emerged since we were working as individuals. There was the inevitable low talking and whispering, a few giggles here and there, some sharing of gluesticks and magazine pages…. But as a whole it was a w/holy silent session.
Let’s make zine pages where everyone is just gluing bits on willy nilly, laughing and arguing about where everything should go, then delving into the meaning of it all. Let’s “emerge together”!
Without knowing it at the time, Olivera and Sarah responded creatively to this provocation and playfully “broke the rules” during the workshop to co-construct their zine pages (see Figure 3). They express this as multi-worlding:
With Maria Lugones’s (Reference Lugones1987) metaphor of “travelling” close, we found zine-making inviting us to “travel” to the worlds of others; to delve into multiple, intersecting, co-temporaneous realities where our collaborating multiple selves as be(com)ings continuously re-discovered and re-formed on the collage-covered page.
The journey of “words-travelling” (Lugones, Reference Lugones1987) or “worlds-travelling” was possible because of our openness to enter a shared “playfulness” – openness to be “a novice”– as Paul Carter would say on collaboration in this kind of multi-selved material thinking – openness to dis-member ourselves and re-member anew (Carter, Reference Carter2004) with cutting, ripping, gluing, chatting, listening to what was and form something entirely else on the page and off the page – openness to be at ease, and to embrace different “personas’ and new worlds, different arrangements of spacetimematter with the agency placed on sticking together something that doesn’t even exist yet. With the playfulness of the zine-creating process in focus, knowing “while playful we have not abandoned ourselves to, nor are we stuck in any particular “world… We are there creatively. We are not passive” (Lugones, Reference Lugones1987, pp. 16–18). With this close, we know we were in a process of multi-worlding, touring, travelling with words, making new worlds.
Had we travelled together through the zine, how might ideas have emerged in our multi-world? What might have changed, had we taken this approach to negotiate across the group as a whole about what to put where? We offer these provocations to future educators and invite ever playful approaches to zine-making.
The more-than-human in the room…
Not only were we collaborating as makers of the zine pages, but we were also co-creatingFootnote 3 with the materials, the authors of those materials, the subjects of imagery which strongly featured other animals and plants, and our entanglements with more-than-humanFootnote 4 others in the room (including the climate), all of which contributed to our making. Thus, the materials themselves were brought into conversation, as Katie explains:
As I slowly turned over the materials, I worked with them, was in conversation with them. Kontturi (Reference Kontturi2018) describes how materials act on us as well as us on them by stating that “Artists do not make Art of materials but with them” (p. 12). Materials join with us in our co-creation of an Artwork…
The hands-on experience of cutting, pasting, and arranging elements on the page was a reminder of the value of tactile, manual work in a digital age. It allowed me to connect more deeply with the subject matter and to slow down and pay attention.
Lisa also spoke of the way things emerged from the conversation between materials and the workshop prompts (see Figure 1):
My zine page was created by choosing images that seemed to flow out of the magazines I tore them from, emerging with a poem that had just been concocted from thoughts and words extracted from a group writing exercise on the topic of climate justice and interconnection…
Similarly, Chantelle reflected on how the process of making generated new insights:
In arts-led research there are always thoughts yet to be expressed that come through in the process and the pieces produced. In the making, feelings and thoughts arise – for me it was the solastalgia (Albrecht) for familiar places made strange through loss and the need for change as we remake estranged places into home.
Implicit in these reflections, and when read alongside the zine images and poems, the more-than-human presence becomes clear as an agent in the making, shaping our choices.
And in the joy of making we find a space to rebel…
The playfulness of zine-making leads to opportunities for rebellion. Zine-making as a rebellious pedagogy can open spaces for affective responses and more gentle forms of disruption that weave relational threads. In the workshop, zine-making’s “rebellious” histories presented themselves. We discovered how zine-making enables us not to be bound by strict instructions. Instead, we found joy in the ambiguity and spontaneity of this liberating co-thinking-feeling-doing-making. We were inspired by this shared “playfulness” even rebelliousness.
The rebellious potential of zine-making as a pedagogy opens space for critical questioning about complex topics such as climate (in)justice through story, materiality, and art-making. As Chantelle (see Figure 2) illustrates in her reflection of zine-making as “opening up” space theoretically and materially, to critique, to feel through climate (in)justice:
I didn’t realise at the time that what I was creating in those pieces was imagery that opens up space, a feeling of calm and elements of cultural critique. There is space created in these images, with wispy skies and depth of field while a moth-human child walks down ancient stone stairs or a floral snake climbs the page margin. The child’s expression is one of melancholy and the scenes are in themselves sparse, with a mowed grass verge and leafless trees suggestive of the feeling of solalstagia or loss that can manifest when climate impacts make places feel unfamiliar or strange.
Marilyn and Aspa also reflected on how critical questioning, rebellion and disruption got entangled, not only in their creative process, but in their own feeling-thinking about the climate crisis and climate injustices. As Aspa (see Figure 1) theorises:
Disruption is not often viewed as justice; however, it can be a powerful catalyst for positive changes in climate justice education. Disruption, to promote climate justice, can take on many forms. I draw on Nancy Fraser’s understanding of social justice applying this to climate justice, to provide an overview of my Zine entry. Here, the redistributive, recognitive, and representative elements of social justice (Fraser, Reference Fraser2009) have also enabled the discussion on disruption.
Disruption “as” justice holds those in power to account and challenges the status quo…
I also draw on the work of Thomas Piketty (Piketty & Goldhammer, Reference Piketty and Goldhammer2014). an economist, who makes the point that there is an unequal concentration of wealth. The wealth of the top one per cent is increasing at a faster rate than for anyone else. As such, fluctuations in climate, including persistent droughts, severe floods, bushfires, and extreme temperatures in the oceans and on land, disproportionately affect those who are already impacted by social injustices. This is not to say that climate events discriminate on the basis of geography or affluence, but when a climate event impacts people and nations that are already dealing with high rates of poverty, or locations where economic policies do not acknowledge climate change, then the effects of climate injustice have a greater impact. Climate justice education needs to disrupt this maldistribution of resources and wealth and insist governments implement economic policies that reinforce equality across individuals and nations.
And then, Marilyn (see Figure 3) writes:
We all panic that
We’re all in this climate crisis, but if we add climate justice to the mix
We’re not all in it together!
Global injustices aren’t linked to the climate crisis, they are the climate crisis NOW!
Climate justice education refocuses me to the urgent call to broaden climate change research. demanding mitigation, not adaptation, to encompass global social justice issues, inclusive of environment, economic and disempowered systems.
Climate justice education programmes – ignore it at our peril!
Scrambling for pictures
That speak to me
Of my stance
On climate justice …
Clear blue skies, barren landscapes, winding river,
+
Buildings, commerce, people rushing,
Question mark??
Disassembled clock … NOW-TIME is crucial!
Cutting, arranging, re-arranging, glueing
A timely reminder to
Refocus … remember … reflect on …revive
Decentring text and structure…
Zine-making is also a political and affective process of decentring text and structure, which challenges colonial languages and forms of environmental representation (see Hunter and Lobo, Reference Hunter, Lobo, Lobo, Mayes and Bedford2024). Zine-making through its DIY ethos (Smith et al., Reference Smith, Cartwright, Brennan-Lister, Brooks, Collins, Colson, Cook and Munnery2024) disrupts aesthetic constraints or coherence that might be easier to engage with than more traditional forms of art-making. At the same time, it holds space to pose complex questions about climate injustice such as: Whose knowledge are we giving space to enunciate in this climate crisis? Whose are we submerging? Whose technologies are we engaging conveniently when compatible with our pre-determined frameworks and approaches? As Liberty (see Figure 1) shared:
I do not consider myself an artsy person. I can’t blend colours into layers or hues or shadows or contrasts. I wouldn’t know the difference between teal and green, styles of brush strokes, acrylic and oil. Cut-outs afforded me much freedom to just be and shed all my conscious musings of being aesthetic, structured, and coherent in creating art. I wasn’t thinking much while I was making this zine. It almost felt like my hands did the thinking as they touched the texture of the yarn, and its redness – yes, it’s redness – spoke volumes to me that I could not articulate through text. The yarn as a typhoon/cyclone – this metaphor brought me back to my “why” of being in this field of “disaster × education” even as I still grapple with a multitude of questions on “how” to ethically, responsibly, and lovingly respond to justice issues brought about by climate change.
In Lismore, a floodplain, where Indigenous people have long stated that one should not build a town, much less a city, at its lowest point.
In Lismore, where the levee that was supposed to protect the community, was not able to contain the water.
Knowledge was buried, and some washed away, in Bundjalung land.
And so I asked, again: Whose knowledge? Whose voices are represented in discourses about disasters and climate change?
Who do we dis/empower in our attempts to build community resilience? Whose voices do we diminish in policies for climate change mitigation and adaptation?
A space for multiplicity and affect…
Zine-making holds together multiple affective responses that can complicate linear or contained understandings and solutions to a climate poly-crisis. Zine-making as a pedagogy does not prescribe or seek solutions; it holds space in the art-making processes to feel through place and the here-and-now. As Alexandra (see Figure 4) shared on her art-making process:
Drill, baby, drill.
Greenland. Canada. Gaza. But,
I didn’t know this yet, even though I knew it would be violent. And,
I was at work.
As Laura and Chantelle eased us into Zine-making, their resources, their examples, anticipative that we all would think and make collages of hope and action for climate justice, that we would yield renewed faith for the survival of the planet and all of its creatures, entities, air, waters and places,
I did what
I always do.
I tried to centre myself on country.
I breathed and
I paused. And then
I looked, captivated by the interesting images and texts apparent all around me.
I’m a maker, an artist; it’s what
I do. And so, the process drew
me in, to create, to make, to think, to plan, to hope.
Zine-making as a loving pedagogy…
Finally, in our discussions after the workshop we found that zine-making can invite more care-full (full of care), tender and loving pedagogies (Hooks, Reference Hooks1994). As Laura writes on her love letter to her daughter:
A love letter to my daughter. A love letter to Pachamama, to country. A love letter to creating space for collective consciousness with Pachamama, with her plights for justice. Through this love letter to my daughter, I want to break through hegemonic and individualised love that marginalises the relationality of the personal, the embodied, and the political. This is not about individualised, hegemonic and romanticised love. Love is personal, embodied, political and collective.
How do we stand against those systems that marginalise and silence love? What can we do for climate justice as educators? We create spaces for love, for collective consciousness, for care and for climate care.
We must teach from and for intergenerational love.
Love as justice,
love as being in collective solidarity,
love as camaraderie,
love as a practice of freedom (hooks Reference Hooks1994),
love as pedagogy (Freire, Reference Freire1970; Darder, Reference Darder2017),
love as climate justice.
Then, Olivera and Sarah share on their poem on climate justice:
A poem on climate justice
Climate justice is care-full care – a tender and fierce weaving of care for
everyone and everything.
A genuine, care-full responsibility. A call for humans to co-exist with more-than-human entities equitably.
Not as an afterthought, not as an occasional gesture, but as a conscious continual endeavour.
A care-full ethical species healing that resists tokenism…
Starting and ending with how we be(come) together
by OliveraSarahzine
In opening spaces to share multiple affects, play and create together, zine-making invites pedagogies that are rebellious, loving, caring and inter(be)coming with each other and the more-than-human.
Conclusion
In poly-crisis times of floods and authoritarianism, where disruption, despair and anger permeate our feeling-thinking-doing-making as educators, zine-making can open moments of transformative learning as a pedagogy that centres creativity, play, rebellion, love and care. In this article, we have narrated how this pedagogy can help us feel-think while making-doing through climate (in)justice, opening space for affect, embodiment and multiplicity. The creative, material and relational encounters of zine-making open possibilities to feel-think the climate to health, so that its complex topics can be felt, unravelled, narrated, drawn, and collaged in relation to where learners are at in multiple forms that disrupt text, structure, and epistemic and academic constraints as we go about our doing-making. At the same time, the “lightness,” playfulness, and care, in which we approached the zine-making process in our workshop demonstrates a loving pedagogy that allowed a gentle way-in, in which everyone was met where they were at (e.g. mothering, advocating, researching, worrying, loving), to express their own agendas and feelings. We pose this playful pedagogy as also serious: climate justice learnings with care through responsive material play can disrupt more traditional lessons and colonial representations of climate change with invitations to think-feel-do-make – an invitation to wonder with zine-making; an opening for what’s next (Maclure, Reference MacLure2013).
Acknowledgements
We thank the Sustainability, Environments, and the Arts in Education Research Centre for hosting the retreat that inspired this article.
Ethical statement
Nothing to note.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Author Biographies
Laura Rodriguez Castro is a Vice-Chancellor Senior Research Fellow and educator at Southern Cross University’s Sustainability, Environments, and the Arts in Education Research Centre and Faculty of Education, Australia. Her research focuses on Southern knowledges of anti/decoloniality and feminisms, critical and public pedagogies, memory studies and rurality. Her work also contributes to methodological debates on arts, visual and participatory methods. She is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Intercultural Studies and the Secretary of the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association.
Chantelle Bayes is a creative writer, educator and researcher working on Yugambeh Country. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Southern Cross University on the ARC project Climate Country. Her research is concerned with writing practice, environmental humanities, urban ecologies and environmental education. Her book Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities was published with Liverpool University Press in 2023.
Sarah M. Crinall is a children’s advocate leading artistic inquiries into people – place partnerships conscious of the unceded lands, waters and skies of Millowl (Phillip Island). As a mother, ecologist, artist, lecturer and researcher / writer, Sarah uses post-qualitative inquiry with art as muse to grow resources and knowledge for healthy science childhoods. Sarah is a member of the Education in the Anthropocene Research Collective, Sustainability, Environment and Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Centre in Australia and Artists with Evidence (AwE) based in New York.
Olivera Kamenarac is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Southern Cross University, Gold Coast Campus. Her research traverses the sociology of education, educational policy studies, and feminist poststructuralist and posthumanist theories of subjectivity. Drawing on academic experience across Serbia, New Zealand, Ireland, Malta, Norway, and Australia, she explores how educational structures, discourses, and praxis (re)configure be(com)ing in/through education. Committed to social and planetary justice, her scholarship interrogates education as a contested terrain where power, politics, and the natural world entangle with transformative and relational possibilities for human and more-than-human intra-be(com)ings.
Liberty Pascua de Rivera is Vice-Chancellor Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education of Southern Cross University. Her research interests include analysing and evaluating policies and their implementation in the areas of education for sustainable development, climate change, and disaster risk reduction. Central to her research is the idea of cognitive justice – what, or whose knowledge, is emphasised or neglected in the process of policy transfer. Dr de Rivera has conducted research and development work in Singapore, the Philippines, Vanuatu, and Australia.
Lisa Siegel is a passionate environmental educator living on unceded Gumbaynggirr lands, on the Mid-North coast of Australia. Her academic research explores the entanglements of environmental education, materialist feminism, and intraconnectivity. Lisa works as a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, where she teachers environmental and interdisciplinary education, and is a member of the Sustainability, Environmental, and Arts Education (SEAE) Research Centre. Lisa is the National President of the Australian Association for Environmental Education.
Marilyn Ahearn is an adjunct lecturer at the Faculty of Education and member of the Sustainability, Environments, and the Arts in Education Research Centre, Southern Cross University, Australia. Her PhD research focused on the impact of teaching the transdisciplinary-based Big History in primary schools and the extent to which it can inform children’s environmental education values. Her current research is based on deep-time perspectives of interconnecting past/present/future, inclusive of the perceptive understanding Indigenous wisdom contributes. She is experienced in primary education, including school leadership and environmental education initiatives.
Katie Hotko is an arts-based educational researcher with expertise in a/r/tography, participatory methodologies, and arts-informed inquiry. Her doctoral thesis, We Make Art and It Makes Us: An A/r/tographic Exploration of Generalist Primary Teachers’ Creative Self-Belief (2022), employed Whiteheadian process philosophy to investigate the relationship between art-making and teacher identity. Another focus of Katie’s research is climate justice and environmental education through child-framed participatory research. Katie is a member of the Sustainability, Environmental, and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Centre. A self-taught visual artist, she is committed to making the visual arts accessible and inclusive for all learners.
Aspa Baroutsis is an associate professor and researcher at the Faculty of Education. She was awarded the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence (mid-career researcher) in 2023. Aspa currently holds an Australian Research Council Linkage grant, investigating ways to support teachers and teaching in flexible and non-traditional schools. She is a member of the Sustainability, Environmental, and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Centre at Southern Cross University. Aspa has published widely in the field, having authored over 40 research publications in scholarly journals and with notable book publishers, co-authoring a number of these publications with other leading scholars in the field. Her most recent book is titled Exploring education policy through newspapers and social media: The politics of mediatisation, published by Routledge.
Alexandra Lasczik is Professor, Arts & Education in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, Australia. She is Associate Dean, Education Partnerships in the Faculty of Education, and co-Leader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Cluster [SEAE]. Alexandra is an expert educator and artist whose chosen mediums are painting, photography, poetry, walking and creative writing through Arts-based Educational Research [ABER], particularly A/r/tography. Alexandra is an Artivist, committed to equity and social justice, and her spirited advocacy of a high quality Arts education for all spans across her entire career.
Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles is the Executive Dean of Southern Cross University’s world-leading Faculty of Education, as well as the Research Leader of the “Sustainability, Environment, and the Arts in Education” (SEAE) Research Centre. She is a career primary-secondary school teacher. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles’s research centres on climate change, childhoodnature, posthuman philosophy, and child-framed research methodologies. She is particularly focused on the pivot points in education, science, and philosophy. She has led over 40 national/international research projects, and published more than 180 publications with her latest book entitled “Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries” (with Rousell, Routledge).
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