Across Asia, activists face mounting restrictions and technologically-enhanced surveillance, repression, and control. The project Activist Techtopias: Crafting Alternate Infrastructures of Resistance in Asia, or AlterTech—funded by an ERC (European Research Council) Consolidator Grant—examines how activists navigate these constraints by experimenting with new technological practices and reconfiguring their infrastructures from the ground up. 

We take a broad view of “technology” and “infrastructure”—decentring the digital and foregrounding the vernacular—to explore how activists craft tools and reassemble systems in response to real-world challenges. By studying everyday acts of resistance—and examining how hemispheric connections, embodied practices, and utopian imaginaries also shape activist trajectories—we aim to uncover emerging forms of technopolitics that often remain invisible in conventional discourses of activism.

Grounded in decolonial approaches to technology as well as to research, our team combines rigorous ethnographic

analysis with collaborative, co-creative methods. We believe engaged scholarship—developed with, rather than about, research participants—can generate meaningful insights and interventions during times of deepening constraint.

The project runs from 2026 until 2031 at the Anthropology Department of the University of Amsterdam, and is embedded in the programme group Moving Matters: People, Goods, Power and Ideas.