Ned Coleman-Fountain, Assistant Professor in Sociology, writes about the Zine assessment for our new module Bodies in Social Worlds, which he co-taught with module leader Sarah Ralph-Lane. Abigail Harrison, a sociology student offers some reflections on making a zine.

Embodying Sociology

Sociology students develop their sociological imaginations in the often unfamiliar world of the university. Here, they learn to ‘do sociology’ and become accomplished in a whole range of academic practices. We learn to navigate new buildings; sit in lecture theatres; talk and interact with other students in seminars, and workshops; and search around the library for texts. We learn how to reference (Harvard style), read complex theory, and listen and sit with others whilst we dissect, in our own language, what one or another concept, word or phrase means. We learn to transform how we see the social world around us through our grasp of sociological ideas.

At the centre of this experience sits our body. Being a student is an embodied experience. We may get a flush of worry as we find ourselves among people we don’t know, and who we think must understand things better than us; our concentration fluctuates through tiredness or sensations of hunger during an afternoon lecture; we put on physical performances of ‘being a student’ for the benefit of ourselves and others, taking up the props of student life: our clothes, our books, our pens, our paper. 

Our sociological imagination also involves the body as a way of perceiving and relating to the world. Those ways of perceiving and relating that we develop are often shaped by our sense of our own embodiment. Shaped by our class habitus, ‘race’, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and age.

Here we come to the concept of embodied sociology. To embody sociology means not only developing a sociology that interrogates the body as a sociological phenomenon. It understands that the body is the medium through which we do the social: we all do sociology as fully embodied human beings. This embodiment matters for how we take up and put the discipline into practice through our sociological imagination. 

A Zine for Bodies

In our zine assessment for Bodies in Social Worlds, we asked our students to consider how we might ‘do’ or ‘embody’ sociology as a sort of ‘body work’, and to represent that creatively through zine making. Reflecting on the relationship between sociology and ‘the body’ meant we had to explore how learning about sociology at university has shaped our relationships with our own bodies, from the different settings of learning through to how our developing sociological imagination provides a context for relating to our embodied selves.

Seeing ‘doing sociology’ as a form of body work meant seeing our learning as acting on our bodies. 

We were delighted with how the students responded to this task. There was notable anxiety about the newness of the activity. This was something very different from other forms of assessment which we become used to doing. Many students asked that we give them a word count to set some perimeters for writing.

We used this unfamiliarity as a source of inspiration – how, in learning to do sociology at university, do we embody what Bourdieu calls a ‘feel for the game’. To what extent does writing form part of the sociologist’s habitus, and what happens when we seek to break out of conventional modes of scholarly creation. 

As students’ widened their view they learned better how to take in the academic space. Zines recorded the feeling of sitting chairs not designed for the bodies some students had; their capacity to maintain attention through lectures and workshops; and other ways that the body interrupts and makes its presence known – or as, Leder suggests, how the body ‘dys-appears. These features spoke the a social organisation of the body as well its phenomenological properties.

Looking further still, zines explored the modes of bodily styling and shaping – or body work as we had explored through the work Debra Gimlin. Students explored how they felt about the way they learned to ‘sit’ in their genders, and enact proper forms of presentation through their clothing choices. 

Further still students reflected in their zines on the extent to which ones bodily presence in the classroom marks one as included or not, echoing the words of Nirmal Puwar and Aarti Ratna who delivered one of our guest talks on the module.

Finally, as Sarah and I looked over these objects as they came into us, as we got to hold them in our hands, we were struck by how beautifully personal they were, and how the students had succeeded in using the format not just to explore the concepts, but also to insert themselves in their academic work. Reflective work is often challenging to do in the context of an academic assessment where students often worry about writing in the first person.

In the feedback we got a sense of how happy students were with the work they had managed to do in the end. There was a “great sense of achievement and accomplishment after completion”. They recommend that we continue to run with the assessment, albeit with some changes: more instruction earlier on, some templates, and maybe a word limit. Things to think about, although we might not give way on providing a word limit.

Abigail Harrison: It is right to say there was quite a lot of anxiety around the zine assessment in the beginning. Being the first cohort meant we had no examples of prior work – what was our zine supposed to look like? And whilst I was one of the students who insisted on a word-count originally, upon reflection, the lack of word-count only added to the creative element – my zine would have looked completely different if we had had one.

For the first time, we had complete control over the design, content, and formatting of our assessment and that change was refreshing; physically holding something we had created gave a lot of us a sense of achievement in the end. We had to think about how we could show the meaning behind theory without words, how we could use drawings or photographs to deliver an effective message – skills that I think we had rarely used until this point.

The zine assessment, and the module on a whole, allowed for us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, our own bodies, and how they fit into the university setting – it is a module I am grateful to have had the chance to study.

Amanda McBride is a Sociology PhD student, studying gender and the night time economy. Ruth Lewis interviewed her to find out the back story to her animation about ‘pulling’ – How To Pull! (without inadvertently being a creep or a sex offender) – produced with artist Graeme from Arms Reach

Q: How did you come to make an animation about sexual harassment?

A: I won a Cumberland Lodge Scholarship 2017 and applied for a development grant from them. The grants are to enable PhD students to do researcher development activities that PhD stipends don’t cover – eg podcast training, workshops and other experiences. I’m really interested in visual representations; I love zines and comics and I think very visually – I use mind-maps all the time. The focus on sexual harassment came about because it’s an aspect of my research that didn’t really make it into the thesis in a major way but it was so persistent in the interviews that I didn’t want it to be lost. Graeme is an artist and someone I talk to about this kind of stuff and we decided that would be a good way to spend the money- collaborating with an artist to create an output I couldn’t do otherwise.

Q: Why an animation?

A: I am ambivalent, confused about current attempts to change behaviours around sexual harassment. I don’t know what’s going to work. I’m not on the internet – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – at all but I know young people use those things and I really like using clips and videos in my teaching. And animation has the possibility of text and image. Communication is so visual now. What I’ve learned is that animations are particularly good because you don’t have to overload people with verbal, textual, wordy info. There are other dimensions to people’s learning. We wanted it to have a light tone and people to relate to it in a gentle way. And that could be done with visuals in a way that didn’t undermine the importance of the message.

Q: So what was your approach for the animation?

A: Let’s assume that lads are at least oblivious that they’re sexually harassing. I don’t think most lads who do it are aware – they just go out and do what everyone else is doing. I just wanted to frame it in that way. I was eager no one would feel attacked. So much of the harassment is born out of not knowing how to speak to people you fancy. It somehow seems to take more confidence to ask someone if they want a drink than it does to walk past them and grab their arse! So we wanted an informative video, coming from a gentle, kind, humorous place about what the girls said they didn’t want. It’s based on interviews with women but we made it relatively gender-neutral. It’s they’re pulling tips for anyone – girls who are pulling girls, boys who are pulling boys, girls who are pulling boys, boys who are pulling girls. There are a lot of stereotypes about non-hetero practices but non-straight people are having some pretty hairy experiences too. On the posters that go with the animation, there’s no reference to gender – other than that it’s based on interviews with women in the NE. We wanted to make it as gender-neutral as possible. There are girls who engage in dodgy practices too – I didn’t want to make it just about straight men, but it’s based on young women’s accounts about their experiences with straight men. Sexual aggression can manifest all over the shop and it’s too complex a message – that  it’s ultimately linked to heteronormativity – that’s more than a 2 minute animation can capture! So we thought focusing on three tips would help.

Q: What was the hardest part of the project?

A: I like being left to my own devices when it comes to work, so this was my first real attempt at working with someone. Collaborating with someone I knew was on same page obviously helped but opening myself up to feedback isn’t something I do easily; I had to remain open to Graeme’s suggestions, which were always excellent. Graeme initially edited the script and ended up contributing a lot to it, including the best jokes.  

The other really hard thing was expecting someone to work for free. Because the grant was small, Graeme got paid for two days and it took him a month of work. And he gave a third of the money to the guy who did the music. He did it because he wanted to. It really was a labour of love. So the hardest part was the recognition that there is very little money flying around for this kind of stuff and that it’s obviously not something that is valued by those holding the money.

Q: Who d’you want to see the animation?

A: Young people. I’m aware there is a culture of sharing things you find funny, things that enter into cultural consciousness. Which is why we wanted to make it light touch – I think that works. I’m not a behavioural change scientist and not involved in front line activism so I just thought ‘what’s a nice light way for people to engage with this?’ And I wanted it to be useful as a resource because institutions are keen to provide direct guidance to their students around consent, gender behaviours and that sort of thing, so thought it could be resource for educators.

Q: What kind of response have you had, so far?

A: People seem to really like – I’ve had lots of good feedback about it. Another Cumberland Lodge scholar works on the Good Lad Initiative and he’s shared it through that campaign so it should get a pretty wide, diverse audience. Shout-up, which campaigns to make our pubs, clubs, bars and venues sexual harassment free zones, has also been in touch and it’ll be included in their training for venue staff.

Q: What’s next?

A: I want to continue with more outputs for the public and I’m currently working on a collaboration with Chantal Herbert of Sister Shack (a feminist organisation that promotes and supports women in the creative industries), to make something audial, a podcast or radio show. Of course, I’m also prepping for the viva and attempting to get some academic articles published!

Amanda submitted her thesis, entitled ‘High Spirits: young women’s pleasure in the night time economy’ in December 2019 and is now preparing for her viva.