DIY,Alternative Cultures & Society

This article explores artistic creation as a critical operation in prison, focusing on CORPOEMCADEIA, a contemporary dance project with inmates at Linhó Prison, Portugal. Using a qualitative, ethnographic approach, and drawing on pragmatic sociology, it examines how dance enables embodied, aesthetic engagement that reconfigures prison experience. Through gestures and movement, critique emerges as a sensitive, situated, and nondiscursive practice that reveals moral and subjective tensions. The article argues that, even under constraint, dance can function as a form of poetic justice and political expression, offering alternative ways of being and relating.

This article argues that DIY musical instrument innovation and live-looping in Mozambique functions as a decolonial practice, asserting what I term sonic sovereignty. Drawing on remix theory, African temporality, and Playability Theory, it examines the transformation of traditional instruments—specifically the MidiMbira and the Kankumbwe—through digital performance. A 2024 live-looping set is analyzed in which archival footage was modularized into audiovisual stems, controlled via tactile interfaces, and layered with improvisation. Methodologically, the article combines practice-based research with ethnographic engagement and remix aesthetics. The RIY³ (Remix/Recycle/Re-signify It Yourself) framework conceptualizes DIY as a culturally embedded, recursive logic that prioritizes continuity over novelty. In contrast to Global North framings of DIY as leisure-based resistance—rooted in voluntary disengagement and creative subcultures—Mozambican DIY emerges from constraint and cultural inheritance. It is not merely reactive, but a situated form of creative agency forged through necessity, collaboration, and historical continuity.

Autonomy, as a political and cultural ideal, is understood as the capacity to live and organise beyond the reach of state and capital. The history of Copenhagen's Freetown Christiania shows how fragile and relational autonomy is, especially at the scale of an entire urban district. Founded in 1971 as a squatted military base, Christiania has endured as a space of countercultural experimentation, illicit markets and communal living, while simultaneously becoming a tourist attraction and a target for state incorporation. Drawing on media analysis, documentary research and ethnographic observation, this article traces Christiania's shifting status as abject space and real utopia, self-organised community and commodified space, informal settlement and normalised urban district. By examining how Christiania navigates these tensions, it illuminates the ways in which autonomous spaces can simultaneously resist and reproduce the forces they oppose, revealing autonomy not as a fixed condition, but as a dynamic and relational bundle of tensions and transformations.

In this article, I explore cultural conceptions and practices of digital literacy articulated in three distinct areas of social action in Singapore, a technology-dense nation. Using qualitative content analysis and interviews with 33 esports players, I compare governmental digital literacy initiatives, grassroots esports programming, and individual players’ narratives and DIY practices. I show that governmental initiatives emphasize functional and protectionist competencies such as technical know-how, computational thinking, and risk mitigation, while grassroots esports programs and individual player practices connect players to a broader range of digital-relevant competencies, including technical, informational, productive, creative, problem-solving, critical thinking, collaborative, and communicative knowledge and skills. The findings represent DIY participatory practices and cultures as crucial but underappreciated milieux in which young people develop competencies that are increasingly necessary for networked life in a digital society. I couch my analysis within a discussion of the entanglement of grassroot and DIY practices with dominant culture.