ABOUT

As the past years have proven, the methods for conducting and distributing research that we’ve inherited from our disciplinary traditions can be remarkably brittle in the face of rapidly changing social and mobility norms. The ways we work and the ways we meet are questions newly opened for practical and theoretical inquiry; we both need to solve real problems in our daily lives and account for the constitutive effects of these solutions on the character of the knowledge we produce. Methods are not neutral tools, and nor are they fixed ones. As such, the work of inventing, repairing, and hacking methods is a necessary, if often underexplored, part of the wider research process.

This conference aims to better interrogate and celebrate such experiments with method. Borrowing from the spirit and circuits of exchange in earlier DIY cultures, it takes the form of a zine ring distributed via postal mail. Participants will craft zines describing methodological experiments and/or how-to guides, which the conference organisers will subsequently mail out to all participants. Feedback on conference proceedings will also proceed through the mail, as well as during optional workshops and discussion sessions on Zoom during the zine-making process.

The conference itself is thus an experiment with different temporalities and medialities of research exchange. As a practical benefit, this format guarantees that the experience will be free of Zoom fatigue, timezone difficulties, travel expenses, and visa headaches. More generatively, it may also afford slower thinking, richer aesthetic possibilities, more diverse forms of circulation, and perhaps even some amount of delight. The conference format itself is part of the DIY experiment.

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Conference Format, 2026

Prospective participants will submit approximately 300-500 word pitches to lowcarbonmethods@gmail.com by April 20th, describing their proposed topic and format. These submissions will be juried, with conference acceptance determined through a combined assessment of potential analytic merit, aesthetics, and the viability of the project plan.

This year, we will organize the conference around three distinct streams, based on print modality: 1) conventional printing, 2) risograph printing, and 3) experimental/self-published. To keep costs and logistics manageable, participants will only receive print copies of the zines in their specific conference stream. The timelines and design restrictions vary slightly between them.

Conventional Stream: Participants will submit digital, print-ready pdfs to the conference organizers by June 15th. We will then print the zines at the Digital Writing and Research Lab’s ZineShop at the University of Texas at Austin and mail them to you, along with the others in the same stream.

Design restrictions: We can print on letter (8.5x11) and legal (8.5x14 inches) standard paper; 11x14 inches double-sided polar matte paper; and high-quality photo paper in a variety of sizes. While we may have trouble stapling booklets greater than 20 sheets of paper, we can accept more complex cut and fold designs if instructions are provided. Print files should take the form of greyscale or colour PDFs that are numbered.

Best for: People with limited print design experience, with an interest in high-resolution/photorealistic colour palettes. People experimenting with the form of their zine (such as a form that requires more folds, cuts, size, etc.) but still fit the design restrictions above.

Risograph Stream: Participants will submit digital, print-ready pdfs to the conference organizers by June 15th. We will then print the zines in the Experimental Methods & Media Lab and mail them to you, along with the others in the same stream.

Design restrictions: We can only print on letter (8.5x11 inches) or legal (8.5x14 inch) paper. We cannot extensively cut prints down to smaller sizes. We may have trouble stapling booklets greater than 20 sheets of paper. We have access to a limited number of ink colours. Print files need to take the form of colour separated, greyscale PDFs (i.e. 1 greyscale file for blue ink, 1 greyscale file for pink ink). Risograph machines regularly produce slightly ‘quirky’ misregistrations and dithered effects which can complicate legibility when designing around overlapping colours/small (>12pt) text fonts.

Best for: People working with monochromatic or duotone design schemes, or with an interest in using an offset colour for ‘pop.’

Experimental/Self-Published Stream: Participants will self-publish at least 15 copies of their zine. They will then mail a copy of their zine to all the other participants in this conference stream and both the organizer teams at the University of Texas at Austin/Trent University by 1 August 2026.

Design restrictions: None! Whatever you can personally take on/mail successfully. However, participants in this stream ideally should have reliable and fairly high-quality printing resources that meet the aesthetic goals of the project/conference.

Best for: People thinking unconventionally about the materiality of their zines, or for whom the print process is an important consideration. People who don’t mind a visit to the post office.

Copies of all zines from all streams will be digitized and published in publicly available conference proceedings via the Low-Carbon Research Methods Group’s website and HCommons, allowing for wider circulation and archiving.
Let us know if you would like to receive an update once conference proceedings have been published online.

Timeline

1 March, 2026: Call for Abstracts
20 April, 2026: Pitches Due
29 April, 2026: Responses Out
15 June, 2026: Deadline for PDFs for conventional/risograph printing streams
1 August, 2026: Deadline for mailing out experimental/self-published stream zines
09 Sept, 2026: Zines Mailed

Costs

The conference is free. There are no costs for registration, though we will have a restricted number of contributing participants. We regret that we cannot provide print copies to non-participants, and that teams with multiple participants will only receive a single copy of the zines in their conference stream.

Printing and shipping costs for conventional and risograph printing will be entirely covered by the conference organizers. Participants in the experimental/self-publishing stream can submit receipts for printing/shipping reimbursement, up to $200 CAD/team. We encourage participants in this stream to keep this budget in mind when contemplating their design format.

Discussions and Analyses of the Conference Format

“Dr. Anne Pasek,” Gettin' Air with Terry Greene: The Open Pedagogy Podcast, 3 August, 2023.

Dr. Anne Pasek, Marc Fischer, Craig Campbell, Stephanie Sadre-Orafai"Print Politics: An online conversation for multimodal anthropologists about the power of print," CoMMPCT , 14 July, 2023.

Sidney Drmay, "Low Carbon Methods are Greening Academia with Zines," Broken Pencil Magazine, 15 September, 2022.

Rayner, Sarah, Kees Schuller, and Anne Pasek. 2024. “De l’échange Académique à Faible Impact Carbone: Alter-Recherche, Fanzines, et Pratiques de Convivialité Verte.” Zilsel 14. https://doi.org/10.3917/zil.014.0129.

SUBMISSIONS

Submit pitches (300-500 words) to lowcarbonmethods@gmail.com
Deadline: April 20, 2026
Pitches should clearly identify what conference stream they are intended to fit into, and what design approach the author(s) will take. You may optionally include 1-5 images. A good pitch will tell us both:

what your zine will achieve conceptually (i.e. will it contain an extended analysis of a fieldwork encounter, practical instructions on building a piece of hardware, or an essay analyzing the history and politics of a methodological norm?) and,

how it will come together practically (i.e. a roughly 20 page 8.5 x 5.5 inch booklet made in Affinity publisher featuring duotone photographs; a series of four A4 8-folded booklets drawn by hand; a set of collaged cards on heavy cover paper with images on the recto, text on the verso, etc.).

Potential Questions Participants Might Address

What political and epistemological legacies do we inherit with conventional disciplinary methods, and how might these methods be hacked or repaired to guide research to more feminist/anti-colonial/anti-racist/anti-ableist ends?

What tools, protocols, or systems of collaboration have been key to executing your research and doing so ethically?

How does the incorporation of more-than-discursive modalities of inquiry (i.e. research-creation, arts-based research, critical making, and more) impact the character of your research outputs and wider research community?

What might you or your colleagues accomplish with new methods of exchange and communication? How could our work evolve if our professional communities understood research as more than a process of generating conference papers and peer-reviewed writing?

What tools or methods might be required to produce lower-carbon forms of research and research exchange?

Potential Formats Participants Might Use

A traditional conference paper, in booklet form

An instructional manual or field guide

Comics, flipbooks, illustrated/photo essays, and other experiments in image + text

A chapbook with field notes, vignettes, archival fragments, and methodological reflections thereon

FAQs

Who is this conference open to?

All scholars with an interest in interdisciplinary methodologies, from grad students to senior faculty.

What makes a good pitch?

A good pitch will tell us both:

what your zine will achieve conceptually (will it contain an extended analysis of a fieldwork encounter, practical instructions on building a piece of hardware, or an essay analyzing the history and politics of a methodological norm?) and,
how it will come together practically (i.e. a roughly 20 page 8.5 x 5.5 inch book made in Illustrator; a series of four A4 8-folded booklets drawn by hand; a set of collaged cards on heavy cover paper with images on the recto, text on the verso, etc.).

We’re especially interested in projects that think about how the aesthetics and format of the zine will work to support its ideas and reception/circulation. This doesn’t necessarily mean that only the most artistically adept projects will be selected; you don’t need to be an artist to participate, nor does your execution need to be in any way sleek, professional, or tidy to succeed in communicating your ideas in an interesting way. All that we ask is that you think about, and discuss, how and why your work will look the way you want it to look.

Can I submit more than one idea?

Yes. Feel free to send in as many separate pitches as you'd like. However, we're probably only going to pick one per researcher/research team.

What kinds of things can you print?

This year, we will organize the conference around three distinct streams, based on print modality: 1) conventional printing, 2) risograph printing, and 3) experimental/self-published. To keep costs and logistics manageable, participants will only receive print copies of the zines in their specific conference stream. The timelines and design restrictions vary slightly between them.

Design restrictions: We can print on letter (8.5x11) and legal (8.5x14 inches) standard paper; 11x14 inches double-sided polar matte paper; and high-quality photo paper in a variety of sizes. While we may have trouble stapling booklets greater than 20 sheets of paper, we can accept more complex cut and fold designs if instructions are provided. Print files should take the form of greyscale or colour PDFs that are numbered.

Best for: People with limited print design experience, with an interest in high-resolution/photorealistic colour palettes. People experimenting with the form of their zine (such as a form that requires more folds, cuts, size, etc.) but still fit the design restrictions above.

Design restrictions: We can only print on letter (8.5x11 inches) or legal (8.5x14 inch) paper. We cannot extensively cut prints down to smaller sizes. We may have trouble stapling booklets greater than 20 sheets of paper. We have access to a limited number of ink colours. Print files need to take the form of colour separated, greyscale PDFs (i.e. 1 greyscale file for blue ink, 1 greyscale file for pink ink). Risograph machines regularly produce slightly ‘quirky’ misregistrations and dithered effects which can complicate legibility when designing around overlapping colours/small (>12pt) text fonts.

Best for: People working with monochromatic or duotone design schemes, or with an interest in using an offset colour for ‘pop.’

Design restrictions: None! Whatever you can personally take on/mail successfully. However, participants in this stream ideally should have reliable and fairly high-quality printing resources that meet the aesthetic goals of the project/conference.

Best for: People thinking unconventionally about the materiality of their zines, or for whom the print process is an important consideration. People who don’t mind a visit to the post office.

If you’re aiming for something ambitious, keep in touch with us so we can troubleshoot potential print problems together. You can learn more about riso printing methods and constraints at:

Pindot Press’s YouTube Channel
Print Guides by the University of Illinois, University of Brighton, and Risotto Print Studio
EMM Lab's riso basics tutorials on printing + scanning, basic image design with Affinity Photo, and duotone images in Affinity Photo.

What if you can’t print the very cool but unconventional idea we have for our zine?

The Experimental/Self-Published Stream is for cool and unconventional zine ideas! Participants under this stream will self-publish at least 15 copies of their zine. They will then mail a copy of their zine to all the other participants in this conference stream and both the organizer teams at the University of Texas at Austin/Trent University by 1 August 2026. Participants in the experimental/self-publishing stream can submit receipts for printing/shipping reimbursement, up to $200 CAD/team. We encourage participants in this stream to keep this budget in mind when contemplating their design format.

I don’t know how to make a zine / I am worried about not being artistic enough. Can I still participate?

Absolutely! Zines come with an august tradition of amateur attempts, authentically rough-around-the-edges execution, and plain text entrants. The basic skills are easy to learn, and the conference team is keen to support the acquisition of new tricks.

We will offer drop-in help/co-working sessions and zine design workshops/co-working sessions to provide support to participants. You also can find guides and templates here:

Basic Microsoft Word Booklet

12 page InDesign template

Single page, 8x fold booklet (one might create a few of these and bundle them together)

Can teams participate?

Absolutely. We welcome multi-/collectively-authored projects. Just mention your corresponding author in your pitch. We will mail copies of the conference materials to the designated corresponding author.

What if I live somewhere where the mail is unreliable?

Reach out and let us know how best to navigate your local mail system (i.e. special instructions, preferred carriers, and more). We’ll do our best to make sure your conference package reaches you in a timely fashion. We’ve also built a very spacious schedule to allow for variable mail delivery times.

I have access needs that make mail/printed text tricky. What should I do?

I’m not ready to contribute a zine, but I would like to receive them. Can I still participate?

To keep shipping costs under control, only contributing participants will get physical mail. But digital versions of the zines will be available online for all to read and cite. Let us know if you would like to receive an update once conference proceedings have been published online.

How will pitches be evaluated?

We will assemble a jury to evaluate proposals and determine the conference list. Jury members will have expertise in both a wide range of research methods and experimental media.

How many zines will be accepted into the conference?

This will depend on the number of submissions we receive and the technical challenges/workload of printing the projects we select, but something in the ballpark of 20-30 seems likely.

Low Carbon Methods

The Low-Carbon Research Methods Group is a loosely affiliated network of scholars interested in examining how climate change not only stands to alter what we study, but how we do so.

Its founding hypothesis is that an energy transition for academic methods—like energy transitions everywhere—offers opportunities to re-examine long-held assumptions and to redistribute benefits and harms (for both good and for ill).

Working across different methodological traditions, as well as discursive and nondiscursive forms of inquiry, the research group seeks to explore the social and institutional prospects of decarbonizing academia, as well as the equity and epistemological gains that might be won thereby.

The research group is founded and coordinated by Anne Pasek of Trent University.

Read more about research groups and other projects at the Low Carbon Research Methods website.

You can also follow @LowCarbonMethod on Twitter for updates and upcoming events.

Do you want to be notified when we release conference proceedings online? Yes! Notify me