Common Margins

Common Margins is the action research initiative behind pliegOS, focused on the study of co-creation and distribution of zines, chapbooks and other DIY paper-based publications within community settings, ethnographic studies and learning processes.

In addition to providing facilitation and editorial support in these contexts, the project develops open-source tools and replicable methodologies for rapid writing, editing, printing and sharing of publications, as well as qualitative data gathering and content analysis of these outcomes as research and educational materials.

The Common Margins project is anchored in three key conceptual frameworks:

Bibliodiversity and paper-based formats as slow technologies: The project draws on the principle of bibliodiversity to foreground the importance of pluralism in publishing practices –across voices, formats and aesthetic traditions. Following Chris Atton’s work on alternative and radical media, we view zines and chapbooks not merely as marginal artefacts, but as vital tools of counter-public knowledge production and learning. This lens intersects with Ivan Illich’s concept of convivial tools (technologies that enable autonomy and cooperation rather than dependency) reframing paper as a “slow technology” that supports resilience, access and collective meaning-making. Through this approach, we examine ephemeral print cultures and processes as sustainable infrastructures of memory, expression and cultural self-determination.
Algorithmic refusal and the politics of analog creation: In critical response to the rise of algorithmic culture, as explored by authors like Lev Manovich, Common Margins investigates the aesthetic, ethical and political implications of resisting automation and generative AI in creative practices. We focus on analog workflows (typewriters, collage, hand-made layouts and zine obfuscation) as acts of tactical refusal, not driven by nostalgia but by a deliberate disalignment with extractive digital logics. These analog spaces foreground human slowness, error and intimacy as alternative creative epistemologies. Drawing from Haché’s work on feminist infrastructures, we analyze how such practices disrupt dominant models of speed, control, and machinic efficiency in knowledge production.
Open knowledge practices across infrastructures and content: Aligned with Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” and grounded in feminist and commons-based epistemologies, our open knowledge approach encompasses both the what and the how of DIY publishing. All tools, templates and methodologies developed through Common Margins are shared under open licenses, promoting reuse, transparency and collective authorship. Inspired by feminist tech ethics, we treat openness not as a purely technical condition, but as a situated, relational practice –where infrastructures themselves become spaces for negotiating care, accountability and resistance. We extend this logic to our analog-digital hybridity, community archiving models and experimental zine-journal formats and distribution.

Methodological approaches

Our research combines situated ethnographic approaches with creative, collaborative and archival practices. We draw from four interrelated methodologies:

Participant observation and fieldwork in co-creation workshops and retreats, where zine-making becomes both a research method iself and a form of situated engagement with communities, learners and/or activists.
Content and format analysis of zines and chapbooks –both those co-created within Common Margins and others sourced from contemporary or historical initiatives and collections. This analysis explores themes, aesthetics, narrative strategies and publishing contexts.
Interviews and focus groups with zine authors, collectors, micro-editorials, collectives and members of social movements, tracing the motivations, networks and political imaginaries behind independent publishing and alternative distribution networks.
Citizen science and participatory practices, including the co-creation and open collection of zines in both public repositories and in a peer-reviewed, print-only journal (in zine format) developed through the project itself.

Common Margins is co-funded by the research grant RYC2022-036634-I, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MICIU) and the State Research Agency (MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), with co-funding from the European Social Fund Plus (FSE+).