‘Zine-ing’ research otherwise: care, joy, and creative co-design with racially marginalised communities

This zine emerges from a participatory research project, focused on co-designing equitable digital services in energy, housing, and health sectors, rooted in the lived experience and insights co-produced with racially minoritised communities in England and Scotland. The zine documents not only the output of our creative workshops, such as the code of practice, but also the processes, values, and critical reflections that shaped our participatory and anti-racism work. By sharing the zine, we highlight the generative potential of creative methods to foster ethical, inclusive, and transformative spaces for collaboration and meaningful participatory research. We argue that the zine format embodies a politics of care, inviting reflections on how research can be done and shared differently. We sought to resist institutionalised and extractivist modes of knowledge (co-)creation and dissemination. Instead, centring reciprocity, joy, and accessibility as significant to participatory practices. Our creative co-design choices in the workshops, including: playful metaphors (‘cooking a dish’), collective storytelling, and graphic recording, facilitated spaces to engage participants in ways that felt meaningful and restorative. Beyond reporting the findings, the zine acts as a creative non-traditional means of dissemination that makes knowledge accessible without gatekeeping and academic jargons. Through the zine, we explored the process of participatory research, challenging dominant conceptions of rigour and impact, which are often tied to metrics that undervalue relational and process-oriented work. Thus, the zine offers both a record of our co-design process and a provocation of how might creative research dissemination contribute to reimagining research not as extraction but as repair.