Our stories of origins: Decolonial healing through zines and zine-making

Abstract

Zine-making can facilitate our remembering of origin stories and experiential knowledge around our differential racializations within coloniality; it can illuminate who we are in relation to systemic racism and power and, importantly, how we might work toward liberatory futures for self and community. In this article, we describe how psychology can be transformed through zines and zine-making. As expressions of insurgencies, resistance, and protest, zines are self-publications that often comprise "writing, photography, collage, illustration and/or other creative work" (Watson & Bennett, 2021, p. 115), and they can look like mini-booklets, vision boards, dioramas, origamis, mobiles, or any kind of creative, mixed form made of found and repurposed materials (e.g., old letters, family photos, cardboard boxes, newspapers). Grounded in Critical Race counter-storytelling methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), rematriation (Gray, 2022), and Blafemme (Mosley, 2023), our zine-making workshop series invite youth of Color in middle and high school to examine their experiences as racialized people in the United States. We focus our discussions on the zines and zine-making processes of seven Black and Asian American women in our workshop. We reflect on ways that psychologists and educators could consider zine-making in clinical, teaching, and research practices. As a hands-on praxis toward decolonial healing, zine-making amplifies our experiential knowledge, encourages collective well-being, fosters critical consciousness, and helps cultivate cross-racial solidarity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).