This article proposes a reinterpretation of early American hardcore punk's DIY ethos by situating it within the longer moral genealogy of American individualism and religious ethics. Rather than reading DIY practices as a simple rejection of capitalism, authority or mass culture, it argues that American hardcore punk reconfigured enduring moral traditions shaped by Protestant asceticism, self-reliance and disciplined self-governance. Drawing on Weber, Lasch, McLoughlin and Bellah et al., the study approaches DIY as a technique of ethical formation under post-utopian conditions marked by the erosion of collective ideals. Through case studies of Black Flag in Southern California and Ian MacKaye's Dischord Records and Straight Edge in Washington, D.C., it shows how labour, restraint and self-control functioned as moral tests through which authenticity was earned rather than expressed. Far from escaping American moral traditions, these formative trajectories worked through them in austere and demanding ways, revealing DIY as a secularised ethic of responsibility and self-discipline.
Instagram is one of the most popular forms of social media in Australia, and the de-facto platform used by local music scenes. Do-it-yourself (DIY) musicians, fans and institutions have been entangled with social media for over two decades. Yet, based on 20 interviews with DIY participants in Melbourne, I argue that Instagram poses distinct, nascent challenges for those involved in local scenes. Utilising the writings of Susan Leigh Star alongside ethnographic fieldwork, Instagram is conceptualised as a form of infrastructure for Melbourne's DIY scene. Responses from the interviews are contrasted with the history of Instagram's development to explore when Instagram became infrastructural for local DIY music. I outline Instagram's succession of Facebook within this context, highlighting the preference of users for its more streamlined interface, native design for mobile phones and effective integration of short-form video and ephemeral content. Meta's earning calls are then analysed to demonstrate Instagram's limiting of DIY content on users’ feeds, and the inherent tensions between Instagram's profit motive, the experience of its users and its viability as infrastructure for local DIY scenes.
Studies of the music industry have traditionally prioritized its creative dimensions, especially musicians’ activities. When ‘non-creative’ aspects of music creation are examined, they are typically approached through musicians’ own ‘non-creative’ activities. Despite the insistence of scholars to consider both art worlds and ‘humdrum inputs’, less is known about music managers. As a result, their working lives and experiences remain underexplored. Therefore, we ask: what are the routes, routines and rewards that typify contemporary music management in Europe? Based on a mixed-methods approach, we show that music managers are similar to other DIY professionals. Their careers are often informal and self-directed, shaped by learning-by-doing and mentorship rather than formalized training. Their everyday work demands a combination of business acumen and emotional labour, as they mediate between artistic aspirations and market constraints. While financial stability is precarious, participants describe intrinsic rewards as central motivations for remaining in the field.
This article analyses a wartime feminist publication, Zhenskaia Pravda (Women's Truth), founded by the Feminist Anti-War Resistance shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. We examine the publication as an activist do-it-yourself newspaper and a contemporary version of Soviet samizdat . We explore how, in its 41 issues, it speaks to the intended Russian female readers and, we suggest, invites them to take part in anti-war action. We show how Zhenskaia Pravda puts forward three main types of activist ‘selves’ to which readers can relate: a decolonial activist self, a dissident self and an everyday heroine self. By uncovering these selves, we expose conflicting representations of gender, coloniality and popular feminism, and suggest that Zhenskaia Pravda strategically combines these elements. We argue that it employs a flexible distribution format and ambiguous messaging to speak to diverse Russian audiences and to encourage anti-war resistance.
This article examines punk in Greater São Paulo (1977–1985), highlighting how censorship, repression, and moral control shaped practices and identities. Drawing on fanzines, censorship records, and manifestos, it frames the DIY ethos as a political and ethical stance under authoritarian rule. Through cultural autonomy, music, visual provocation, and collective action, punks redefined resistance. Internal conflicts, including the “punk war,” reflected broader struggles over authenticity and legitimacy. Despite repression and fragmentation, the scene contributed to the late dictatorship's redemocratization, turning everyday rebellion into historical practice.
This article examines how digital fundraising reconfigures cultural entrepreneurship among DIY musicians. Through interviews with Dutch DIY musicians who have successfully used crowdfunding and representatives from two platforms, we demonstrate how crowdfunding enables musicians to mobilize Bourdieu's alternative forms of capital and convert them into economic capital. While social capital remains a key driver of economic capital in crowdfunding, our study highlights how fan communities, rather than peers, now provide the favors that support music production. Crowdfunding campaigns not only generate buzz but also serve as a reputation qualifier for programmers and funders, converting symbolic capital (recognition) into future economic returns. The involvement of backers, sometimes as cocreators, reinforces this process by signaling market demand. However, we also identify the hidden costs of building a fanbase, where sustained engagement can lead to the forgoing of economic capital.
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.
The digitization process has been reshaping music scenes all over the world in diverse and ambiguous ways. Such ambiguities are all the more visible among scenes in the Global South: those scenes, and the countries they hail from, have experienced the digital in ways that often do not conform to the standards, norms, and narratives established by digitization in the Global North. By reviewing the literature on the digital infrastructures of music scenes outside of the North, this article looks as such diversity, pointing out how digital infrastructures are often marked by fragility, lag, and unequal access. This may pose the condition for Southern scenes to invent alternative scene arrangements, alternative forms of digitization, and even alternative pathways into digital modernity. At the same time, the fragility of digital infrastructures signifies the enduring dependence and structural violence suffered by the Global South at the hands of the Global North.
This paper reads Indian influencer Urfi Javed as a paradigmatic case of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) celebrity, arguing that her notoriety is a processual enterprise rather than an accident. Situated at the intersection of subversive creativity and platform capitalism, Javed's DIY fashion functions simultaneously as aesthetic dissent and a strategic mechanism for converting structural precarity into viral capital. Drawing on qualitative analysis of her output and press coverage, the paper identifies three mechanisms: bricolage-based DIY as low-cost, high-impact visibility labour, algorithmic amplification produced through paparazzi co-production and engineered controversy, and a postfeminist performance that alternately enacts empowerment and attracts patriarchal scrutiny. Her trajectory reveals how attention economies facilitate the monetisation of ‘subversive frivolity’, potentially challenging Bollywood's class-gender hierarchies while contributing to the commodification of selfhood in digital culture. Ultimately, this study underscores how Javed's blueprint – transforming affective labour into durable brand power – can reshape contemporary DIY celebrification, influence, and self-representation.
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.
Emerging from conversations at two symposiums, ‘Zines Revisited’ (2022) and ‘Selfing and Shelving’ (2024), held at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, this special issue reflects on the tension between zines’ alternative media identities and their increasing institutionalisation, represented by the growing number of institutions, including public and university libraries, building their zine archives. In the introduction, the editors propose the concepts of ‘selfing’ and ‘shelving’, which capture these seemingly opposing processes and underpin the special issue. While ‘selfing’ hints at how the individual or collective self is constructed or ‘manufactured’ through writing and publishing zines, ‘shelving’ represents the practical and theoretical challenges of zine archiving, both to document cultural practice and to preserve these vulnerable or resistant voices into the future. The contributions in this special issue trace how zines enable modes of selfing in relation to disability or antiwar zinetivism, and present practical reflections on the challenges of running a zine archive within the university and more. The special issue contributes to a continuing dialogue among scholars, archivists, and practitioners.
The TL;DR Zine Archive is a collection of graphic design and illustration zines located at Washington University in St Louis (WashU). Curated by the authors—respectively, a graphic designer and an illustrator—the collection has three parts: the archive, in WashU Special Collections; a touring collection, travelling to other institutions through designed exhibitions; and a teaching collection used by WashU faculty. TL;DR (“too long; didn’t read”) privileges short-form writing, picture-making, narrative comics, and integrated text-and-image essays, encouraging practitioners like us to explore critical questions, enact authorship, and build an intellectual community. Here, we discuss the process of making and running the archive and address the tensions that we navigate in situating such a project within an academic institution.
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 RIY 3 (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.
This article examines how four Portuguese independent labels established, throughout this century, do-it-together (DIT) strategies that surpass conventional do-it-yourself (DIY) methodologies, orienting themselves towards collaborative paradigms of sustainability within a scenario of structural instability. The investigation analyses four record companies – Lovers & Lollypops, Omnichord Records, Revolve and Zabra Records – exploring how these initiatives overcome structural issues. The study identifies four specific DIT modalities based on strategic cooperation: functional diversification, cultural territorialisation, collaborative economic democracy and transdisciplinary experimentation. The results reveal how the DIT ethos challenges the contemporary individualisation of musical production, demonstrating that collective alternatives overcome limitations of the ‘DIY’ model through shared infrastructures, mutual support networks and organisational hybridisation. Theoretically, the article distinguishes DIT as an advanced evolution of DIY ethics that redefines urban territories, strengthens local identities and creates typical economies for the indie milieu. Empirically, it offers an analytical framework transferable to similar conjunctures, demonstrating that the pursuit of cultural sustainability depends less on abundant capital than on capacity for social articulation and collective adaptive creativity.
This article explores the relationship between austerity measures undertaken by the government in a top-down manner and the emergence of DIY civic responses to economic inequalities, focusing specifically on the Polish context. To address themes and concepts such as materialism, consumerism, inequality, values and psychological effects as well as community-based counter movements, we explore second-hand circulation practices and movements. By confronting the linear economy of neoliberal culture and circular economy built by grassroots DIY movements, we focus on the actions challenging the culture of excess.
