Dr Patrick O’Hare, Social Anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, takes Cartonera to Scotland.

Cartonera is a publishing movement that grew out of the Argentine economic crisis of 2001. They became known as ‘cartoneros’, after the cartón (cardboard) that they collected on the streets of cities such as Buenos Aires. Since then, the Cartonera model has spread across Latin America and the world. Each Cartonera publisher is different: some continue to work with wastepickers, others with indigenous groups; some focus on poetry, others prose or political texts.

Patrick initiated the first Cartonera project in Scotland, a collaboration with the Creative Change Collective (CCC), a charity working with people in recovery from addiction and in the criminal justice system. CCC tackles social problems through the creative arts, building community and empowering people, an approach that chimes with the cartonera ethos.

CCC heard about Cartonera and invited Patrick to deliver a series of workshops at which the group would make a Cartonera book out of anonymous drama scripts. Participants would learn a new craft and build on the momentum of their arts-based recovery by creating a book series that could be distributed amongst participants, friends, family, policymakers, and an interested public.

In the podcast, you hear the voices of Gary, Teresa, Donna, Emma and Catherine, who attended the workshops, as well as Jo, Anne-Marie and Lorraine, Mark McNicol from CCC, Liam Meechan from AbbeyCare Scotland, Scotland’s Minister for Drug and Alcohol Policy Elena Whitham, and performers at the Paisley event. Thank you to everyone at CCC who participated in this podcast, which was funded by a Small Impact Award from the University of St Andrews and produced by Lucia Scazzocchio from Social Broadcasts.