Global Resiliencies Showcase

Global Resiliencies is a project centred on activist zines produced between 2010 and 2022. It asks how grassroots publications can reflect and shape political movements and collective action across different geopolitical contexts around the globe. At its core, this project seeks to explore how zines—those self-published, often ephemeral documents of resistance—offer unique insights into how people resist, build communities, and foster solidarity across borders.

From 2 October 2024, to 28 February 2025, Global Resiliencies unfolds at the Stuart Hall Library as a living, evolving showcase rather than a conventional, static exhibition. This approach emphasises a continuous process of gathering, sharing, and reflecting on activist voices and materials. The project’s format is open and participatory, designed to create new connections between distant geographies and varied political struggles.

Global Resiliencies is launched alongside an international open call for activist zines. The call invites activists, artists, and cultural workers engaged in various forms of struggle to share their stories, strategies, and visions. In addition to being featured in the exhibition, the selected submissions will become part of the Stuart Hall Library’s zine collection, expanding it to include more voices, experiences, and forms of resistance. Through the act of collecting, the project aims to ensure the legacies of these movements to inspire future generations.

As part of Global Resiliencies, iniva will also be collaborating with RCA Palestine Society to create a new zine which will record their recent political activism and efforts for Palestinian liberation and those from other student organisations. The zine will explore the work that is often not publicly visible, documenting organising strategies and the complexities of participating in a politically self-organised group.

The evolving showcase features a range of protest zines, and makes space for new contributions as they arrive. This format is an invitation for viewers to return, to engage with new materials, and to reflect on how movements evolve. The library’s zine collection, which already includes over 400 zines that explore cultural identity, race, gender, class, religion, sexuality, and post-colonialism, continues to ensure that these important documents of resistance remain accessible to the public, providing a resource for understanding how communities mobilise, resist, and find solidarity in past and future struggles.

Global Resiliencies is rooted in the Stuart Hall Library’s commitment to documenting the histories and ongoing struggles of the Global Majority. The project departs from research conducted by the Library and Archive team for a lunchtime talk with Assistant Librarian Charlotte Mui, which took place in July 2024. The talk explored the library’s extensive collection of books and zines that document liberation struggles across the globe, from Palestine and Kurdistan to Hong Kong and Ukraine. This foundational research provided a framework for the project, highlighting the role of self-publishing in documenting resilience and resistance already present in the collection, as well as the gaps that needed to be addressed, which provoked the need for integrating new zines and protest materials into the Stuart Hall Library’s permanent collection, allowing the library to continue its work of contextualising and recontextualizing its collection in response to changing political landscapes and ongoing struggles for justice.

Global Resiliencies proposes a double exercise of looking back at the last decade, and looking forward into the future—creating strategies to ensure that these materials can continue to inspire new forms of resistance, new solidarities, and new ways of understanding our worlds. The Stuart Hall Library reaffirms the potential of self-publishing as a tool for social transformation and building collective memory, proposing an evolving archive of resilience, one that lives and expands alongside the movements it documents.

Global Resiliencies is curated by Beatriz Lobo and Charlotte Mui.