Making a research zine

Recently, I co-created a zine as one of my research outputs. It was the first time I had done this, and since I love reading other people's experiences making zines I wanted to share my process.

The zine was about a community based music project about Muslim experiences of music, sound and health. I invited participants to submit artworks, writing, and songs that related to their experiences participating in the group. I also did a thematic analysis of my transcripts from the music sessions, creating some themes for exploration in the zine.

I decided to write out my analysis and quotes from my transcripts by hand in the zine, alongside typed writing to indicate a more formal register (the literature review, for example). I also made illustrations to go throughout.

I included all submissions I received from participants and shared the songs they shared as QR codes. I also included other details like anonymised screenshots of fragments of messages between me and the participants where they had shared a contribution, to represent the process of making the zine.

Once all the submissions were received, I arranged and formatted the whole thing in canva and created a digital version which I shared as a pdf flipbook, and A4 hard copies that I printed at a local print shop.

The final product represents the contributions of everyone in the group, and offers an output that can be engaged with in lots of different ways - from looking at illustrations to scanning the QR codes and listening to songs, to reading. I've received feedback from participants that they enjoyed being part of it and got a new perspective on their own experiences from seeing it represented in the zine. I've also received feedback from others who said they would not have read an academic article but enjoyed engaging with this.

I'm really excited about continuing to use zines as a valuable research output and discovering new ways to share research more widely and engagingly! Recently, the zine was acquired by the Wellcome Collection: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/c38v3rzu

Read it here: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/e274d09eb9.html

Improvising Otherwise: the process of writing my first book!

Yesterday, my first book was published! It’s called Improvising Otherwise and you can read it here.

It was really important to me to publish this work open access, and I thought it would also would be good to share the process of publication for anyone who (like me!) has wondered how it works.

Open access means anyone with internet access can read and download your book for free. Since academic publishing often means inaccessible pricing and gatekept processes around publishing your work, I was really happy to be able to share my work with Open Book Publishers who are a leading independent open access academic press that publishes peer-reviewed work that is completely free for readers to access, with no fees for authors. I originally came across OBP through the wonderful book Acoustemologies in Contact, and I emailed the managing director Alessandra Tosi in March 2024 with a summary of my book proposal, which drew on my PhD research. She replied and said I should share a book proposal and manuscript when it was finished, and that it would then be sent for peer-review. After that, the publishers make a decision on whether or not to publish the book.

I then worked from March-August 2024 on re-writing and revising my PhD research. I found this was a really difficult process, because a doctoral thesis is often extremely tough to go back to and because it was difficult to extract what I wanted without rewriting everything. The tone of a thesis is really different to a book, and it was really important to me that the book could be clear and easily read by anyone interested, not just academics. I returned the manuscript in August 2024, and heard back 5 months later in December 2024 that the book had been accepted for publication, and that I could now go back and do some more edits based on the peer review reports. There were lots of helpful comments in the reports that gave me pointers for changing some bits of my writing, and so the manuscript then went through another editing stage before I returned it in February 2025.

I then worked with OBP editor Adele to revise the manuscript over another few months. I also chose a cover, helped to create the index, and emailed the archives and libraries from where I had used materials to ask permission to use the images. Finally, the book was published yesterday on April 30th 2025. The entire process was really accessible and smooth and I really recommend OBP for anyone who is interested in publishing their work.