Project description
Infrastructures of resistance under digital repression
How do democracy and human rights activists in Asia reshape infrastructures of resistance in response to digital repression? The ERC-funded AlterTech project aims to explore how activists recombine digital, analogue and material technologies to craft alternative high- and low-tech systems that enable under-the-radar mobilisation. Framing these practices as technological craftsmanship, the project explores how political and technological activism converge to produce new forms of technopolitics and ‘techtopias’. Through multi-sited research in Asian exile communities in Europe, South and Southeast Asian countries, and transnational NGOs, AlterTech analyses resistance across scales. Combining theoretical innovation with participatory methods, it advances new concepts of infrastructural intervention and reimagines technological futures for social change.
Objective
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.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been human-validated.
- social sciences political sciences political policies civil society civil society organisations nongovernmental organizations
- social sciences political sciences government systems democracy
- social sciences sociology anthropology science and technology studies
- social sciences sociology anthropology social anthropology
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.