For my masters dissertation, I worked with individuals who use alternative medicines in order to understand what healing means to them, and why traditional healthcare has not sufficiently provided this for them. Together we each made zines on the topic, and the finished products were fascinating. Themes ranged from the individualisation of medicine and the amount of time one received from GPs, to the way the body itself is perceived in either separate, impersonal parts or as a holistic (yet mechanistic) state machine.
The collaborators on the project took their zines home with them, where they could choose to share them with family and friends or even take them to their medical practitioner or therapist. One collaborator chose to share her zine on social media, saying,
The researcher, Ellen, hosted the space and prompted the four of us to talk about our personal ideas of health and healing and what was important for us while we made zines. So many different zines and ideas came out of it from so many different perspectives. It was super interesting... It was such a lovely way to sit and chat and make at the same time!
This workshop was heavily influenced by action research, which attempts to engage individuals with lived experience in the direction and creation of research as collaborators rather than participants. It was extremely important to me, then, that as collaborators were creating their own zines, producing and performing knowledge, that my output (the dissertation) was equally accessible and communicated to the collaborators and others with lived experience.
As few people are likely to read a 16,000 word essay complete with academic jargon, I rendered the dissertation into a lively and - though still not simplified - hopefully more accessible zine.
Here it is for you to read, too.
To cite this zine:
Richardson, Ellen. 2023. The Affective Spaces of Alternative Medicine & The Implications for Healing Experiences. Independent zine. Available online: https://erichardson897.wixsite.com/ellenrichardson-1/post/the-affective-spaces-zine
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