Constellation 1:
RE-DISTRUBUTING
I learned early access to knowledge is unevenly distributed.
Not simply access to education, but access to legitimacy, publication, platforms of circulation, and to being recognised as someone capable of producing knowledge rather than merely embodying experience.
The institution often presents itself as a neutral site of learning while quietly reproducing hierarchies of authority.
Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge remains important here because it rejects the fantasy of objective neutrality. Knowledge never emerges from nowhere. It is produced through specific historical, political, embodied, and material positions. [1] What appears universal often reflects the perspective of those already authorised to speak.
Knowledge is partial, contested, relational, and situated. Yet institutions frequently continue to behave as though authority can remain centralised while inclusion is simply added around the edges.
Building on Haraway’s insistence that knowledge is always situated, Ronald Kolb writes that institutional attempts at inclusion often fail to redistribute authority because, as he observes, “the centre does not shrink”. [2] The phrase lingers because it captures how diversity initiatives often expand participation without redistributing authority. Marginalised practitioners are invited into existing structures while editorial control, funding power, publication infrastructure, and institutional legitimacy remain concentrated in familiar locations.
Inclusion becomes possible, and power remains stable.
Sara Ahmed describes institutions as systems that reproduce themselves through repetition. [3] Diversity can be welcomed rhetorically while existing arrangements of authority remain largely untouched. The language of inclusion risks becoming another mechanism through which institutions maintain legitimacy without surrendering control.
This is why redistribution interests me more than representation; representation asks who appears, redistribution asks who decides. Who publishes, archives, circulates, legitimizes. And who is listened to.
What interests me about zine cultures and self-publishing practices is that they refuse this architecture entirely. Zines emerge from the recognition that mainstream systems of publication cannot adequately contain certain forms of knowledge, anger, intimacy, refusal, or survival. They redistribute information horizontally rather than vertically, through friendship networks, photocopiers, and community libraries through hand-to-hand circulation.
Harney and Moten describe the undercommons as a space where study, knowledge, and collective life continue outside of institutional recognition. Rather than waiting for legitimacy, people build alternative infrastructures for learning, publishing, and survival together. I increasingly think of zine culture in similar terms. They do not simply reject institutions; they construct parallel forms of circulation capable of sustaining knowledge differently. [4]
As Sheila Liming argues, zines operate through a deliberate refusal of the mechanisms of mass media. [5] This refusal is not merely aesthetic; it’s infrastructural. A redistribution of mediation itself. Zines ask difficult questions.
Who gets published?
Who gets Archives?
Who gets reproduced?
Who gets remembered?
And perhaps most importantly, what forms of knowledge become possible once legitimacy is no longer monopolised by institutions.
Paulo Freire’s critique of banking models of education is relevant in this line of thought; knowledge is too often imagined as something delivered from experts to passive recipients. [6] Zine culture interrupts this hierarchy; readers can become writers, and audiences can become producers. Knowledge moves through participation rather than transmission.
This is crucial because redistribution is not only about access to information, it’s also about access to production. The traditional cultural institution frequently separates knowledge producers from audiences, experts from the public, and artists from participants. Zine culture collapses these distinctions. Participation becomes more important than polish, and circulation becomes more important than permanence. Experimentation, failure, and imperfections function effectively as methodology.
This is perhaps why zines continue to unsettle institutional logic and publishing hierarchies. They resist commodification through scale and resist professionalisation through accessibility. They are not fixed and can be reproduced; they are authored collectively and collaboratively rather than having a singular author. They redistribute the means of narration.
Jerilyn Tinio describes zines as spaces where excluded voices create forms of publication that intentionally resist dominant systems. [7] This matters because mainstream publishing has historically privileged particular voices while marginalising others.
Gayatri Spivak’s question remains difficult to ignore: Who is permitted to speak, who is heard, whose speech becomes recognisable as knowledge? [8] There is a specific exhaustion that comes from continuously translating yourself to be legible in institutional legibility. Explaining experience gently enough to remain publishable, formatting anger into academic language, or reducing complexity into digestible diversity statements.
Watching institutions consume marginalised experience as content while leaving structures untouched. Under these conditions, self-publishing becomes more than distribution. It becomes a refusal.
Audre Lorde reminds us that transforming silence into language is never merely expressive. It is political; speaking becomes a way of refusing disappearance. [9] This feels deeply connected to zine cultures. Zines rarely pretend to universality, its roughness announces embodiment. Each moment of production. Every photocopied page. Every stapled binding. Every collaged fragment. Recording the conditions of its own making.
Recent research on Zineography described zines as collaborative forms of sense-making capable of communicating plural narratives within unequal contexts. [10] What matters here is not simply dissemination but co-production.
Knowledge is produced together, not delivered downward.
I return to the idea of redistribution as something relational rather than purely economic.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos argues that struggles for social justice must also be struggles for cognitive justice. [11] Unequal power operates through knowledge systems themselves. Certain forms of knowing become institutionalised while others remain invisible, illegible, or dismissed as anecdotal. This is why redistribution cannot only mean redistributing funding. It must also involve redistributing authorship, visibility, publication, legitimacy, and epistemic authority.
Libraries, universities, galleries, and archives all participate in constructing historical memory. What they preserve shapes future understandings of culture itself. Every archive constructs a history, every publication, and every citation has legitimacy. As does every omission, constructing a disappearance.
Jacques Ranciere describes politics as a redistribution of what can be seen, heard, and recognised. [12] Redistribution, therefore, concerns not only resources but perception itself.
Whose realities become visible?
Whose knowledge becomes thinkable?
Despite technological abundance, visibility remains unevenly distributed. Algorithms centralise attention much like institutions centralise authority, but people continue to build alternative structures anyway. Small gestures of informational survival.
In Staying With The Trouble, Haraway writes about making kin as a practice of world-building. [13] I think redistribution functions similarly. It creates relationships through circulation. Knowledge survives not because it is preserved perfectly, but because it continues moving between people.
Maybe this is where re-distribution begins, not simply in redistributing resources, but the capacity to narrate reality itself and circulate knowledge horizontally, preserving what would otherwise be erased.
Culture has never only been produced through institutions. It has always been produced in kitchens, bedrooms, community spaces, libraries, print studios, activist meetings, and folded sheets of paper passed quietly between hands. These fragile infrastructures persist because they understand something institutions often forget: knowledge survives through circulation, but it flourishes in relation. Re-distribution begins not with the movement of information alone, but with the redistribution of the capacity to speak, to publish, to remember, and to recognise one another as producers of knowledge.
NOTES:
[1] Donna Haraway, 'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective', Feminist Studies, 14.3 (1988)
[2] Ronald Kolb, 'Situated Knowledges and Interdependence in the Exhibitionary-Educational Complex', OnCurating, 53 (2022).
[3] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
[4] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013)
[5] Sheila Liming, 'Of Anarchy and Amateurism: Zine Publication and Print Dissent', The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 43.2 (2010)
[6] Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. by Myra Bergman Ramos, 30th anniversary edn (New York: Continuum, 2000)
[7] Jerilyn Tinio, 'Zines as Praxis: Making Space for Participatory Culture in the Academic Library', Journal of Radical Librarianship, 10 (2024)
[8] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988)
[9] Audre Lorde, 'The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action', in Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984)
[10] Kiersten Hay and others, 'Zineography: A Community-Based Research-through-Design Method of Zine Making for Unequal Contexts', in Proceedings of NordiCHI 2024 (New York: ACM, 2024)
[11] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2014)
[12] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004)
[13] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).