Independent Researcher

About

I am Argentine and I hold a Paris 8 (France) Licence in Anthropology. I am currently writing the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina) M.A. in International Studies' dissertation.

I was a Latin American Social Sciences Council (CLACSO)'s junior Research Fellow. I studied political and indigenous rap music in Bolivian Highlands and its relationship with both the rappers identity and with different sources of funding and support as many NGOs, embassies, political parties and social movements promote diverse actions within the rap scene. I had also worked as a research assistant of a British PhD candidate  that conducted field work in Argentina.

I am currently studying the geographical "expansion" of "editoriales cartoneras" (cardboard publishing houses) across mainly Latin America, but also across Europe and Africa. The first one was opened in Argentina as a response to 2001 crisis. It would hire street cardboard pickers to hand make books out of cardboard that they had previously collected. Distinguished writers would give away their stories’ copyrights to the press so they could be stapled to the cardboard covers and be sold at an affordable price and thus “democratize literature”. This press had very strong anti-neoliberal discourses, generally criticising “big neoliberal publishing houses”. The Argentine first project opened in 2003 and now there are more than 40 different cardboard publishers across more than 15 Latin American, European and African countries. However, the initial idea was not appropriated in the same way in every country. Dulcineia Catadora in Sao Paulo, Brazil, works for example with youngsters from favelas, the one in the North of Chile is based in a detention centre; and there are many presses that do not work with “at-risk” groups and their aim is to promote local literature and cultural activities. For this research I travelled across 7 countries so as to conduct field work with the local “editoriales cartoneras”.

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