Intentional Creation: Reflecting on our Agency through Zine-Making

At once, our proposed workshop looks forward and back in time. We consider the future of personal and community archiving amidst the rise of fickle technology, generative AI for text and image generation, and constant pushes for content rather than intentional preservation and creation. For instance: the ouroboros of “AI slop”—training its models on previously generated “content”—produces less and less meaning. In a time of anti-intellectualism and low media literacy, this feels particularly dangerous. We look to the past for advice, drawing from scrappy revolutionary and resistance movements of the last several decades. They emphasized the importance of community, independent thought, artistic expression, and personal reflection. This workshop aims to take a small step towards resisting the oncoming waves of such technologies forced upon us by prioritizing and privileging our own creativity and creation. We believe information creation is an expression of identity and personal knowledge, reflecting an individual’s capacity as a knower. In this workshop, we will create zines, pamphlets, and other ephemera, with guiding prompts such as: “What is something about the present day you would like to be preserved?”, “What is one thing you wish people knew more about archives?”, and “How might we engage the public with approachable guides to little-known subcultural art? (i.e. The Transfeminine Review).” We open the workshop with frameworks derived from our own dissertations, then open it up to the audience for an in-depth discussion of the practice of creation and how we might incorporate it into our daily lives (as well as our classrooms and workplaces). We will incorporate recommendations on affect in creating information, acknowledging and moving with our feelings particularly in a time that urges dissociation from reality and our bodies. This workshop aims to be a reflective meditation on forward and backward thinking in a time where we are encouraged to not think at all and let technology do it for us. We hope participants walk away with both tangible and emotional artifacts from this workshop.

Isabelle “Beck” Mallwitz
Isabelle “Beck” Mallwitz is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. Their research focuses on the intersection of information practices, community archives, and queer/trans studies. They hold a B.S. in Integrated Engineering Studies and a minor in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. Their dissertation seeks to map the landscape of queer community archives in the U.S. in the mid-2020s amidst unprecedented levels of transphobia, ableism, and xenophobia, threatening the existence and valuation of queer archival materials and increasing the importance of community-based preservation efforts.

Nazelie Doghramadjian
Nazelie Doghramadjian is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research focuses on intellectual choices made in the Armenian community in the United States when preserving their records and their impact on academic archives and special collections. She works with community stakeholders, scholars, and practitioners alike. She holds a B.A. in Humanities from Villanova University. Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals and juried proceedings such as Archival Science on Armenian women’s archives, and the Association for Library and Information Science Education on personal archival stewardship. She has presented her work on archival silences, narrative approaches to recordkeeping, and best principles for working with diaspora archives at several conferences in the archival, American studies, and Armenian studies fields. Before starting graduate school, Nazelie worked for a variety of non-profit organizations including Data & Society Research Institute, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, and A Better Tech NYU.