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‘I came like the thunder and I vanish like the wind’: exploring genre repertoire and document work in the Assemblea operai e studenti of 1969

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Abstract

This paper will examine a suite of documents generated within one Italian post-war social movement as a means to explore four assertions: (a) that the common practice of addressing the printed word generated by social movements primarily as bearers of linguistic and conceptual content (‘texts’) too often comes at the price of ignoring certain fundamental matters of which the materiality of these documents can inform us; (b) that, connected to this, the lenses of genre and genre repertoire offer important means of deepening our readings not only of the content of social movement documents, but also the broader context of their production and use; (c) used with care, understandings of genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents can likewise inform the efforts of those working—in the community, in the history and heritage professions, and at the intersection of all three—to preserve and manage such documents; (d) reflections upon genre, genre repertoire and the materiality of documents may also contribute to the ongoing development of a critical information studies.

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Notes

  1. I am indebted to Amanda Cossham for this observation.

  2. As one of the anonymous referees also astutely noted, ‘Paper selling and leaflet distribution can act as a substitute for such conversations, allowing the activist to overcome embarrassment/shyness/lack of confidence by having a leaflet to hand out.’

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge Alex Burlacu’s assistance in the collection of documents held in the Centro Pietro Studi Gobetti in Turin. I am also grateful to two anonymous referees as well as Amanda Cossham, Ron Day, Nat Enright, Joanne Evans and Tim Murphy for feedback on earlier versions of this paper. All mistakes are my own; unless otherwise stated, all translations are also my own.

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  1. Caulfield School of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Steve Wright

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Wright, S. ‘I came like the thunder and I vanish like the wind’: exploring genre repertoire and document work in the Assemblea operai e studenti of 1969. Arch Sci 12, 411–436 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-012-9177-2

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