Dynamics of Community Zine

Inspired from the September 2025 VU Moondani Balluk Research Writing Retreat held on Taungurung Country and Dr. Paola Balla’s prompt to disseminate knowledge in self-determined and multi-modal ways, students and staff gathered over several sessions at Moondani Balluk to re-connect with each other through our individual and collective research projects. Through dialogue and creative play, we were guided by co-created prompts. A sample of these included:

• What are you bringing to your research from the stories you hold (spaces/places, entities, ancestors, narratives, objects etc)?

• How does your research make you think about your own histories and relationships?

• What have we learned from other in thir room?

• How has this manifested in our research process and our lives?

• What are the lineages that inform our work?

• How do we see the others in the space reflected/living in our work?

Form these prompts and discussions, a central theme of “Entanglements” was chosen, exploring the entanglements of research, identity, belonging, psychologies, coloniality, and relationships. Collaboratively we joined our individual collages, zines and inquiries to form an 80-page zine from 12 authors across Moondani Balluk and CIDRN.

In facing an increasingly globalised world, our proximity to the everyday becomes our anchor for re-examining our efforts to reclaim, recover and transform the ways we think and perceive ourselves, especially for those of us from the global majority. In this endeavour to recover the epistemologies that live in everyday life and our place as epistemic beings, each from our specific locations, when inhabiting overexploited and stolen lands. We draw on education, as a site, to ignite our memory and histories to recover and reclaim our roots of knowledge. As graduate students, we were interested in engaging in conversations with fellow students across the world to share the ways we are thinking about and experiencing education. In the effort to strengthen international networks and to remind us that we are not alone in our questioning and imagining of an education that is by and for us.  

 We connected through the SCRA networks, Gusto and Pandu, located in Indonesia, and Charlene, Mary, Juan-Camilo and Angela, as people in the diaspora living in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Gusto and Pandu have previously been part of an SCRA initiative called ‘language belongs to everyone’, which sought to find ways forward in breaking the language barriers to global knowledge exchange and accompanying psychosocial tensions that come with navigating the barriers (TPC winter, 2026). Gusto and Pandu’s idea to continue connecting students across multiple locations, with the support of Tiffeny Jimenez and Christopher Sonn, brought the team together. We connected over video calls for several weeks to get to know each other, shared our experiences in education across multiple local contexts, and, from these conversations, co-created prompts that shaped and guided the dialogue sessions.  

 We paired up to co-facilitate three sessions, each two hours long, the first on how our local contexts and cultural roots shape the ways we learn, teach, and build knowledge. The second was on the challenges around education, and the third on the possibilities for (re)imagining education. The sessions sought to encourage reflection on multimodal expression, such as art, photography, music, or poetry, with an emphasis that no artistic or creative experience was required. The collaborative zine includes reflections of 13 authors who participated in the dialogues.