By Faye Daigle

On Tuesday evening, March 31, eight members of Tulane’s CORE Collective, the university’s resident arts and culture magazine and an offshoot of TU Fashion, visited Special Collections to explore the Meredith Stern Radical Feminist zine archive. Compiled by Stern, a Tulane alumna, this collection contains 521 zines that cover a broad range of themes from DIY culture and feminism to classism and skateboarding.

During CORE’s visit, Samantha Schafer and Faye Daigle shared a curated selection of zines that highlighted the diversity of themes, voices, and formats represented in the collection. These materials were excellent examples of how independent publishing can allow creators to embrace experimentation in both content and form. For the Collective, they also offered a point of reflection on their own work as producers of a student-led print magazine.

After being introduced to TUSC, the group learned how to navigate and search within collection finding aids, skills that would be useful for future inquiry or research. The visit also included a discussion of preservation practices, emphasizing the importance of maintaining CORE’s issues as part of the university's record.

The session concluded with a brief tour of the exhibition Cut from a Different Cloth: Fashion Selections from Tulane Special Collections, where students saw how they provided a fitting lens through which the students could consider how style, identity, and craft intersect across both archival collections and their own publication work. Altogether, the visit connected the act of creating a zine or magazine with the work of preserving and interpreting it.

Following their visit, CORE’s editor, Annika Paulson, shared that the collective intends to archive one copy of every edition of the magazine, preserving their work for future research and creative use.