Left-wing academics have introduced ‘zines’ to challenge ‘Eurocentric standards’ that reward white, middle-class students
Degree programmes, according to England’s university watchdog, the Office for Students (OFS), should provide “stretch and rigour” and test undergraduates’ academic acumen and skills. But in an era of social activism and inclusion, what passes for scholarship might surprise many.
Instead of writing an essay, undergraduates at some universities are being asked to produce “zines” – hand-made mini magazines, generally A5 in size or smaller, combining text, images and illustrations. The DIY leaflets have their roots in the protest pamphlets of the 1960s that could be cheaply made and distributed by activists campaigning against the various injustices of “The Man”.
Academics who set them for students described them as an “authentic” and “decolonised” method of teaching. Justification for their use given by one Bristol University lecturer is typical. She says that traditional essays “often test certain classed and Eurocentric ways of knowing and ways of writing”, whereas zines can be part of a “truly decolonised curriculum”.
Another at Edinburgh describes the pamphlets as a medium for people to “express themselves freely and creatively, celebrate the quirks of everyday life and build subcultures”.
A researcher from Glasgow comes at scholarship from a perspective that “people are not disabled by their bodies or minds, but by barriers in society”, and says that zines promote “participatory learning, validation of personal experience and the development of critical thinking”.
According to some Left-wing academics, colonial powers imposed their educational models, languages and values on colonised societies at the expense of “indigenous knowledge systems”. Traditional exams and essay writing are seen as a manifestation of this because they supposedly maintain that cultural and intellectual superiority, and focus on white, male and Western knowledge, while attempting to mould diverse students to conform to this “Eurocentric standard”.
Traditional exams give an advantage to students who can recall information quickly under pressure, concentrate and maintain focus. Both exams and essays reward excellent English language writing skills. All of these demands could be difficult for some groups of students, who are said to be effectively punished and excluded for not fitting the colonial mould.
Decolonised methods challenge these “colonial” legacies by moving beyond “Western-centric” methods, which are often essay-based, to include “authentic” tasks and “student-centred approaches” that value creativity, culture and “lived experiences”. As one academic puts it, universities need to move away from “death by essay” to “reflections, collaborations, narratives and storytelling”.
Diane Watt, an English literature professor at Surrey University, runs a zine workshop as part of a module on medieval women’s writing. The exercise is “not a substitute for conventional assessments”, and it doesn’t count towards the student’s degree, according to the university.
Watt notes that zines were popular in the 1970s and 1980s amongst marginalised groups, “such as lesbians”. She became interested in them when working on a project on queer manuscripts and noticed “a connection between the modern zine and some medieval manuscripts”.
“My zine workshops are about asking students to create zines related in some way to medieval women’s voices, the more marginal the better,” writes the professor. “The results have been incredibly creative – they have covered a range of topics from queer romance to medieval virginity, and disability to mysticism.”
Degree courses in geography, history, ecology, English literature and sociology at a range of institutions, including Bristol, Exeter, Surrey, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Northumbria, have included zine making as part of teaching and learning.
For some traditionalists in higher education, this all seems extraordinary.
David Abulafia, professor emeritus of Mediterranean history at Cambridge University, described them as “nonsense”, and questions how such a piece of work could contain the reasoned, well constructed arguments that are expected of students.
Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, likened them to “little more than comics”.
“They are educational confetti that devalue the degree currency,” he says. “In promoting them, universities are effectively signing their own death warrant – if UK degrees lose their credibility with overseas students, they will lose this major source of income.”
The trend for zines can be seen as part of a bigger movement in UK universities to move away from traditional methods of judging what students know, towards “inclusive teaching and assessment”.
Its aim is to close the “attainment gap” – the proportion of first and 2:1 degrees awarded to white, middle-class students compared with undergraduates from ethnic minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, and those with mental health problems, “neurodiversity” or disabilities.
In the pursuit of this aim, institutions across the country are replacing unseen, in-person exams with open-book, take-home and online versions. An undergraduate diet of essay writing is being enlivened with more “innovative” forms of assignments, such as presentations, videos, group work, academic diary writing – and zines.
The rationale for inclusive teaching and assessment is laid out in official documents called “access and participation plans” that all institutions must submit to the OFS. Recent plans, covering 2025 to 2030, outline measures across higher education to “decolonise” courses and challenge “colonial roots and biases in the curriculum”. Academics warn that these biases lead to “Eurocentric assumptions” about which knowledge and skills are most valuable.
Bristol is requiring academics to offer “different varieties, choices and topics of assessment” to enable students to “play to their strengths and minimise disadvantage”. Meanwhile, across faculties at King’s College London, a major programme will diversify teaching and assessment to give students a clear sense of “fairness”, and to strengthen “student voice and agency”.
Sheffield is undertaking a university-wide review to “remove barriers that can be experienced disproportionately by students from under-represented groups”. Its plan says that in the long term, inclusive assessment practices will be the norm across all programmes, “improving attainment across black, Asian and minority ethnic communities, and students from poorer backgrounds and those eligible for free school meals”.
Oxford too will “use a more diverse and inclusive range of assessments” to help “improve the likelihood” of students from “lower socio-economic backgrounds” achieving better grades. Cambridge, meanwhile, is concerned that “assessment practices” may be to blame for “awarding gaps”, and it hopes to “improve outcomes” for Black-British and British-Bangladeshi students using alternative methods.
But according to some working in higher education, academic excellence risks being sacrificed on the altar of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI). Rather than raising all students up to reach the expected standard, the standard is lowered, while at the same time, the very idea of having a standard is attacked as a colonial conceit.
Edward Skidelsky, lecturer in philosophy at Exeter University and director of the Committee for Academic Freedom, says: “The insulting assumption underlying these efforts to ‘close the attainment gap’ is that poor and minority students can’t think or write.”
Abulafia has similar concerns about what he calls “unashamed manipulation”.
“The argument that zines are more suitable for women or minorities insults all of them by assuming that their brains can’t cope with the sort of logical, structured argument one expects in an essay. And it is impossible to see how something that has never been ‘colonised’ can be ‘decolonised.’”
As theories of decolonisation and social justice take hold, though, the traditional notion of a university as a place that focuses on academically able students, and assesses them accordingly, is increasingly challenged.
Despite receiving huge amounts of public money in the form of teaching grants and student loan subsidies, universities are autonomous institutions that decide what they teach, how it is taught and how students’ work is judged. Universities set, mark and grade their own assessments.
The OFS wants to see awarding gaps between different groups closed, and seems happy to leave it up to institutions to choose how to do it. It has no idea, for instance, how many degree courses in England use traditional exams and how many have dumped them.
Despite OFS promises of a new quality regime, there seems to be little appetite for real scrutiny of what teaching and assessment consist of in the era when DEI reigns supreme.
The real losers, in the long term, are likely to be debt-ridden students, according to Skidelsky. “It is,” he says, “a classic case of what George W Bush called ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’”