Activating the Arts for International Development: Community Education, Innovative Models and Transnational Networks

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'Precarious Publishing in Latin America: Relations, meaning and community in movement' (hereafter 'Precarious Publishing') is an ongoing AHRC project funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund from 2018 to 2020. 'Precarious Publishing' focuses on a contemporary publishing phenomenon known in Latin America as editoriales cartoneras, often translated as 'cardboard publishing', because one feature that unites these 250 community organisations is the material from which they make their books: recycled cardboard. Yet the term 'cartonera' encompasses far more than the word 'cardboard'. It is also a reference to the cartonero figure - the cardboard collector or waste picker, a consequence of economic crisis, unemployment and poverty - that was so central in the formation of the first cartonera publisher Eloisa Cartonera in Buenos Aires (2003). Fifteen years on, some of these publishers, like Eloisa and Dulcineia (São Paulo), continue to work with waste-pickers. Many others have recycled the model of promoting change through community workshops, adapting it to address specific social and economic challenges: some work with groups of school children from marginalized rural areas, others with human rights in conflict zones, and others still, promoting sustainable production and consumption of materials and other resources. The 'Precarious Publishing' research team has developed an innovative and interdisciplinary methodological framework to research on - and contribute to - cartonera practices in Mexico and Brazil. This framework is composed of a constellation of collaborative methods, including encuentros cartoneros (round-table debates and open forum discussions), co-publications, exhibitions, and workshops. The 'Activating the Arts' Follow-on-Funding develops the potential for impact arising from this process, by creating unforeseen pathways arising from ongoing engagement with our cartonera collaborators. Together, we have identified the cartonera workshop as the most robust and portable model of community outreach activity, able as it is to respond and adapt to different short and long-term development challenges. Our Follow on Funding brings together academics from Durham University and the University of Surrey, four cartonera publishers (two in Mexico, two in Brazil) - project collaborators with whom the research team have strong existing working relations - and other public stakeholders from the Ministry of Education in Mexico to the Director of the Mário de Andrade Library in São Paulo. Together, we will build, test, share and track an innovative programme of collaborative, creative workshops focused on education for sustainable development (ESD). The four cartonera publishers have been chosen because of their existing engagement with different global challenges, most particularly their work relating to inclusive and quality education; sustainable cities and communities; tackling stigma and inequality; and the promotion of peace and justice. 'Activating the Arts', will first pilot 4 sets of 15 workshops in rural and urban locations in Mexico and Brazil. These workshops will incorporate reflection with action, artistic creativity with social awareness, to build capacity to respond to specific local challenges - which in turn map onto global challenges including quality education, equality, peace and justice, and sustainability. On the basis of this pilot, we will then create a cartonera outreach programme - designed to instantiate multidimensional social and welfare impact - to be shared with all cartonera actors and their collaborators working in NGOs, social movements, and other social initiatives. The potential scalability of this portable socio-artistic model, combined with the transnational networks and collaborations that are already in place, provides an exciting opportunity to build capacity for sustainable development in hard-to-reach, marginalized communities in LMICs across and beyond Latin America.