Three interconnected axes

1. Co-creation as research

Through co-creation workshops, writing retreats and collaborative formats, this axis examines how ephemeral print cultures and co-creation contexts operate as sustainable infrastructures of memory, expression and cultural self-determination. In this sense, ephemeral publications and other analogue materials can be seen and studied as means of citizen ethnography, where participants are not mere “informants” or “learners” but collaborators, processing data or even shaping research questions and outputs.

This axis is rooted in the principle of bibliodiversity, understood as the importance of plural voices, formats and aesthetic traditions in publishing. Following Stephen Duncombe’s (1997) work on alternative and radical media, we view zines and chapbooks not as marginal artefacts but as vital tools of public knowledge production, framing “the personal as political”. This approach also draws on Ivan Illich’s (1973) concept of convivial tools: technologies that enhance autonomy and cooperation, rather than extractive or co-opted dependency. By reframing paper as a slow technology, we highlight its capacity to support resilience, accessibility and collective meaning-making in times of social / digital acceleration.

2. Open infrastructure

In critical response to the rise of algorithmic cultures (Manovich, 2001), this axis explores the practices (politics) of refusal and obfuscation in the face of new automations and generative AI. We experiment with analog and low-tech workflows —typewriters, collage, hand-made layouts, zine encryptions— not as nostalgic gestures but as deliberate tactical refusals of emerging extractive digital logics. Such practices foreground human slowness, error and intimacy as alternative creative epistemologies.

Building on Alex Haché’s (2014) work on technological sovereignty and feminist infrastructures, we analyse how these practices can disrupt dominant models of speed, control and machinic efficiency in knowledge production. At the same time, we support and develop lightweight digital tools (online zine formatting, PDF obfuscation, open access archiving) as R&D for the Commons. Infrastructure is not neutral but political, a space where transparency and accountability can still be designed into the very tools that sustain DIY publishing.

3. Collection & analysis

The third axis focuses on archival and analytical work, situating zines, toolkits and other alternative publications within broader historical and political contexts. Aligned with Donna Haraway’s (2016) call to stay with the trouble, this axis treats openness not as a purely technical condition but as a situated, relational practice. All tools, templates and methodologies generated by Common Margins are shared under open licenses, promoting reuse and collective ownership.

Methodologically, this involves digitising and cataloguing zines (both co-created and historical) and other materials, building accessible repositories and applying content and visual analysis. But more importantly, it involves reframing archives themselves as spaces of negotiation – where governance, accountability and resistance define strategies of preservation. By extending this logic to analog/digital hybridity, community archiving and experimental zine-journal formats, this axis aims to sustain the plural epistemologies of independent publishing and treat them as infrastructures of knowledge in their own right.

References

Duncombe, S. (1997). Notes from underground: Zines and the politics of alternative culture. London: Verso.

Haché, A. (2014). Technological sovereignty. For free information and open internet: independent journalists, community media and hacktivists take action. Ritimo, 165-174.

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. New York: Harper & Row.

Manovich, L. (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.