New event! Information Lives in DIY Culture (15th November 2025)
Date: 15th November 2025
Location: Manchester Metropolitan University
Information Lives in DIY Culture is a day-long event about the relationship between DIY cultures (grassroots and political cultures and practices) and information, archives, libraries and heritage.
Examples of this include (by aren’t limited to!) setting up physical and/or digital grassroots libraries and archives (e.g., Salford Zine Library, Manchester Digital Music Archive), collaborations between institutions and DIY cultural organisers (e.g., People’s History Museum and Over Here Zine Fest), archives of grassroots culture and social movements), and people with a background in DIY culture working in information organisations and the information sector.
The event will be informal and different to more traditional academic conferences. Anyone is welcome to attend, including people involved in DIY cultures (for instance musicians, zine makers, organisers), people who work or volunteer in information organisations (libraries, archives, museums and more!) and people doing research (in universities or any other spaces!). This event aims to bring together people in each of these spaces so that we can learn from each other, share skills and knowledge, and make connections that help sustain our endeavours in the future.
At the minute, we are looking for people who would like to take part in the day by delivering or facilitating an activity. There are lots of options – you could:
- Run a workshop or skills sharing session with a small (10-15 people) or large (30-50 people) group
- Facilitate a discussion with a small group (10-15 people)
- Give a short talk about a relevant topic (5-10 minutes)
- Give a longer talk about a relevant topic or project (30 minutes including questions)
- Coordinate a larger discussion with 3-4 people on stage and an audience (like a panel discussion).
- Have a stall at the event
- Run a pop-up zine library or share an archive at the event
- Do a performance
- Screen a film
- Contribute information or resources to a zine
- Do something else that we haven’t listed as yet!
Suggestions for subjects or themes could include:
- DIY and grassroots history projects
- Zine libraries
- Oral history projects
- How politics of DIY cultures relate to archives, heritage and information work
- Archives of DIY cultures, social movements and other grassroots cultures
- Fan archives
- Queer/QTIPOC archives
- Ethics and archives
- Digital archives
- Information architecture and data protection in DIY projects and activist campaigns
- Information sharing and information seeking within DIY culture
- Processes in archive/library/information work including cataloguing, classification, description, digitisation
- Experiences of working in/with DIY cultural archives, libraries or history projects
- Wikis
Payments of £150 will be available for 10 speakers/facilitators who are not funded to attend by their workplace, or who are in precarious employment.
You can submit your idea for us to consider via this form (deadline: 25th September).
If you would like to attend the event, you can register your interest here. I will contact you as soon as tickets for the event are released (in early October). Tickets will be available on a sliding scale (starting at £0).
There is £1000 available to support travel or accommodation costs for people who would otherwise struggle to attend. Information about these will be released with tickets.
This event is funded by Manchester Metropolitan University’s AHEAD programme.