This research explores the role of zine-making as a disruptive, decolonial feminist methodology (Castro et al., 2025) within neoliberal, settler colonial U.S. higher education. In this participatory focus group study with university students, we confronted institutional coloniality and examined how creative and collaborative methods challenge traditional researcher-subject divides (Jashari, 2026) and Euro/U.S.-centric knowledge production hierarchies (Schöpf et al., 2025) through a multimodal approach with critical dialogues, guided journals, and participatory mapping. I position this research process as a 'bricolage' (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994) or 'messy' (Dancis et al., 2023) praxis because it was an ethically relational (Donald, 2012) space where participants navigated evolving political consciousness, processed institutional frustrations, mapped geographies of exclusion, and envisioned decolonized or abolitionist university possibilities. These sessions culminated in the creation of a collaborative zine and a thematic participatory analysis (Nind, 2011) of participants’ journals. I also integrate autoethnographic practices to chart personal, interpersonal, methodological, and contextual reflexivity (Olmos-Vega et al., 2023). Ultimately, this work demonstrates how zine-making acts as an 'embodied' epistemology (Castro et al., 2025) for interpretive agency and collective liberation, resists cooptation, and manifests alternative, 'pluriversal' (Martinez-Vargas, 2020) spaces of student solidarity and fugitive learning through 'the undercommons' (Harney & Moten, 2013).

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