Activist Techtopias: Crafting Alternate Infrastructures of Resistance in Asia

forthcoming

AlterTech is an ethnographic study of how democracy and human rights activists in Asia alter existing infrastructures of resistance - that is, the organising structures and organisational resources needed for social movements - in the face of digital repression. It studies how activists experiment with new practices and different uses of technologies that are less vulnerable to repression, envisioning these practices as technological craftsmanship. AlterTech traces how activists recombine digital, analogue, and material technologies to craft alternate, high- and low-tech infrastructures that enable activism under the radar of the state. The convergence of political and technological activism in these practices, AlterTech posits, engenders a novel kind of technopolitics and utopian imaginaries, or techtopias. Using the lens of infrastructure, AlterTech studies how this technopolitics takes shape across activist networks in different settings and at multiple scales. Through multi-modal, multi-sited, and multi-scalar ethnographic research among activists in Indonesia, India, and Thailand, exiles from Hong Kong and mainland China in Europe, and transnational NGOs that distribute knowledge and resources, it asks how local positionalities, transnational communities, and hemispheric politics matter to infrastructures of resistance. AlterTech innovates theoretically through an original framework that highlights the interplay of infrastructure, praxis, and utopianism, introducing original concepts such as crafting and decolonial infrastructural intervention. It breaks new ground methodologically through its co-creative participatory approach, in which researchers simulate the craftsmanship they study, developing inventive modes of knowledge production and dissemination. Thereby, it will produce novel insights into infrastructural and political innovations in contemporary social-change efforts that will inspire scholarly and public debates on viable technological futures.