Precarious Publishing in Latin America: Relations, meaning and community in movement

本项目关注的是一个处于文化潮流与社会运动、艺术介入与社区环境项目交汇的当代出版现象。这种现象在拉丁美洲被称为editoriales cartoneras（或巴西的catadoras），通常被翻译为“纸板出版”，因为将各种出版项目联系在一起的一个特点是他们制作书籍的材料：回收纸板。然而，“cartonera”一词的含义远不止英语中的“纸板”。它也指的是cartonero人物——纸板收集者或拾荒者，是经济危机和失业的产物——在布宜诺斯艾利斯成立第一家cartonera出版组织Eloisa cartonera（2003年）的过程中，他们是如此重要。正是从cartoneros那里，Eloisa的创始艺术家和作家获得了灵感，购买了纸板，并与他们一起建立了一个多产的出版工作室，迄今已出版了约200本书。Editoriales cartoneras也可以译为“拾荒出版商”。他们中的一些人，如Eloisa和Dulcineia （<s:1>圣保罗），继续直接与拾取垃圾的人合作。然而，还有许多人将这个想法循环利用，并将其适应不同的当地环境、社区和社会需求：一些人与来自贫困地区的学童群体合作，另一些人与土著社区合作，仅举两个例子。然而，支撑这些不同的、碎片化的项目的是一个共同的概念，即在物质、社会、政治、经济和/或环境不稳定的情况下进行富有成效和创造性的工作。在对巴西和墨西哥的卡托纳拉的比较研究中，我们探讨了两种密切相关的“不稳定出版”：一种艺术趋势和一种社会运动。在方法学方面，这需要一种跨国的、跨学科的方法，将项目同时分析为艺术文本和对象的集合（通过文学分析）和一套生产方法、日常互动、组织逻辑和面向社会转型的社会网络（通过民族志田野调查）。该项目为不同人文和社会科学学科的研究做出了许多贡献。从社会学和人类学的角度来看，它探索了社会运动理论可以有效地扩展到包括-或与-现象对话的方式，如卡通，不仅具有艺术性质，而且在本质上是碎片化的，脆弱的和不稳定的。从文学的角度来看，它填补了研究中的一个重大空白：尽管这些出版商自2003年以来吸引了学者和记者的注意，但他们的重点主要集中在他们出版的不同寻常的方式（组织结构和流程）上，而没有触及书籍的文学形式和内容。我们的项目探讨了书籍的内容和形式（作为文学、哲学或政治文本以及艺术对象）如何在创造新的关系、社区和意义方面发挥关键作用。最后，我们对跨学科方法的创新使用使本研究成为学者研究类似复杂运动的开创性研究，这些运动在全球范围内出现，以应对日益不稳定的经济、社会和环境条件。在学术界之外，我们的项目旨在在学者、出版商、文化推动者和图书馆档案管理员之间建立富有成效的国际合作，这将导致许多共享的产出：出版商、学者和图书管理员共同撰写的一系列博客文章；在伦敦举办的一个参与性展览，参与者将为一本新的卡通书捐款；以及英国参议院图书馆、剑桥大学图书馆和大英图书馆的读者和研究人员可以访问的卡托内拉文本集。

This project focuses on a contemporary publishing phenomenon that lies at the intersection between cultural trend and social movement, artistic intervention and community environmental project. Known in Latin America as editoriales cartoneras (or catadoras in Brazil), the phenomenon is often translated as 'cardboard publishing', because one feature that unites the diverse publishing projects is the material from which they make their books: recycled cardboard. Yet the term 'cartonera' encompasses far more than the English word 'cardboard'. It is also a reference to the cartonero figure - the cardboard collector or waste picker, a product of economic crisis and unemployment - that was so central in the formation of the first cartonera publishing organisation Eloisa Cartonera in Buenos Aires (2003). It was from cartoneros that Eloisa's founding artists and writers gained inspiration and purchased cardboard, and it was with them that they set up a productive publishing workshop that has since published around 200 titles. Editoriales cartoneras might thus also be translated as 'waste-picking publishers'. Some of them, like Eloisa and Dulcineia (São Paulo), continue to work directly with waste-pickers. Many others, though, have recycled the idea, and adapted it to different local contexts, communities and social needs: some work with groups of school children from deprived areas, others with indigenous communities, to name just two examples. What underpins these divergent, fragmented projects, however, is the shared notion of working productively and creatively from a situation of precariousness - material, social, political, economic and/or environmental. In this comparative study of cartoneras from Brazil and Mexico, we explore 'precarious publishing' in its two closely inter-related guises: an artistic trend and a social movement. In methodological terms, this requires a transnational, interdisciplinary approach that analyses the projects simultaneously as a collection of artistic texts and objects (through literary analysis) and a set of production methods, everyday interactions, organizational logics and social networks oriented toward social transformation (through ethnographic fieldwork). This project makes a number of contributions to research across different humanities and social science disciplines. From sociological and anthropological perspectives, it explores the ways in which theories of social movements can be productively broadened out to include - or dialogue with - phenomena that, like cartoneras, are not only artistic in character, but also fragmentary, fragile and precarious in nature. From a literary angle, it fills a significant gap in research: though these publishers have attracted attention from scholars and journalists since 2003, their focus has largely been on the unusual ways in which they publish (organizational structures and processes), leaving the literary form and content of the books untouched. Our project explores how the content and form of the books (as literary, philosophical or political texts and as art objects) play a key part in creating new relations, communities and meaning. Finally, our innovative use of interdisciplinary methods makes this a ground-breaking study for scholars approaching similarly complex movements that are emerging worldwide in response to increasingly precarious economic, social and environmental conditions. Beyond academia, our project is designed to create productive international collaborations between academics, publishers, cultural promoters and library archivists, which will lead to a number of shared outputs: a series of blog posts co-written by publishers, academics and librarians; a participative exhibition in London, in which participants will contribute to a new cartonera book; and a collection of cartonera texts accessible to UK-based readers and researchers at Senate House Library, Cambridge University Library and the British Library.