Blueprint of a Zine

Documenting the Voices of Women Conference in Weimar 2024

Abstract

The blueprint of the zine documents results from the  ‘Voices of Women’ conference 2024 in Weimar organized by researchers, artists and students from Stavanger, Tromsø, Weimar and Groningen. The zine is an innovative and artistic way for conference participants to store their notes and reactions. It breaks with traditional practices of academic engagement and dissemination of knowledge. Through its flexible and spontaneous form, it enables to communicate ideas expressed by researchers in multimodal ways. At one glance, a wide range of associations and topics are presented with the space to add a comment, a conclusion, or a follow-up question by the keeper of the Zine.

The DIY aesthetic facilitates access for a diverse group and supports participation in an inclusive scientific culture. Content and reactions presented during the conference are condensed, narratives visually developed, and novel insights conveyed creatively. Design, language, and visual elements create a space that particularly addresses the contradictions and ambiguities of topics the humanities are concerned with, such as otherness, meaning or memory.

The zine combines critical reflections of the author with aesthetic experiences of what was said, sung and done – while also creating an extraordinary keepsake that was distributed in a 20 hand-made copies beyond the ERASMUS+ consortium and physically spread in Norway, Germany and the Netherlands.