Creativity, collaboration and activism: Reflections on a zine-making workshop exploring feminism and open research

In this short experimental article, which itself draws on zine logics and aesthetics together with feminist compositional strategies, we collaboratively reflect on experiences and insights that emerged from a recent zine-making workshop on feminism and open research held at the University of Sheffield in June 2026. After outlining the workshop's aims, we present interwoven reflections from six participants, the co-authors of this article. Our reflections and their placing-in-dialogue foreground zine-making's facilitation of alternative forms of knowledge-making outside the quantitative, positivist frameworks open science discourse typically privileges. They also, we feel, surface key tenets of our activist, engaged orientation to some of the questions we ask of dominant discourses of open science: whose knowledge(s) and methodologies are privileged within the model of scientific investigation these discourses centre? Which open practices from feminist and qualitative research traditions are overlooked? Who is empowered to take part in open science and which voices are excluded or shouted down? And which forms of bodily and lived experiences, typically erased from scientific and medical discourse, may be recovered and rewritten by more feminist-informed approaches to 'openness'?