Methods: Trans-Formal Research for Transformational Practice

This chapter focuses on our methodology, demonstrating how the indivisibility of social and aesthetic form upon which cartonera is premised presents unique challenges in working across disciplines and modes of thought. Following calls to rethink social science methodologies by scholars including Anand Pandian (2019), our contribution here is to put forward a methodology that engages with artistic practice and literature in a more dynamic relation with the social and political processes in which they are embedded, through a hands-on, experience-based, and collaborative journey. The methodological framework we have developed has emerged through cartonera practices and collaborations such as the Puente Grande prison program that is put under the spotlight in the chapter. We highlight this particular project to show how the practices and texts of the new prison-based publisher Bote Cartonero (Cartonera in Confinement) have disrupted the colonial hierarchies and divisions that are brought into sharp focus by the prison system, inspiring us to develop new methods for working and thinking with cartoneras as interventions in, with, and between artistic, literary, and social forms. Building on these hands-on experiences and in dialogue with Rancière (2004, 2009), García Canclini (2014), and Levine (2015), we propose a “trans-formal” methodology composed of innovative ethnographic methods based on gesture and new reading practices that build on emerging postcritical approaches to literary and cultural studies. Such a framework offers the possibility of researching and experimenting with contemporary cultural practices—located at the interstices of art, society, and politics—in a way that departs from a different understanding of the relations between ethnography, literature, and art and opens up new possibilities for research that aspires to be collaborative, multidisciplinary, transnational, horizontal, and participatory.