About
In the broadest sense, a DIY scholar is someone whose intellectual identity and intellectual pursuits cannot be contained within available institutions, a situation which obliges them to set out into uncharted waters, to clear new pathways, to complement, supplement, circumvent, or otherwise invent practices that further their projects and satisfy their needs.
The intellectual life of the DIY scholar cannot be reduced to the currently existing academic forms. For some of us, there may indeed be moments when our pursuits coincide with institutions, such as universities, in their current neoliberal form, but it is never a good fit and is hardly sustainable in the long run. For some reason or another, we may be inclined to tolerate the mismatch for a time but, ultimately, the underlying conflict cannot be resolved without negating who we are or relinquishing what we desire. Like most loveless marriages, the relationship is constantly pestered by the spectre of estrangement and rarely ends well. Simply put, the demands of our intellectual development are in excess of the constraints of current academic conventions, incapable, as they are, of fostering the basic conditions of good intellectual production. There is, then, a remainder, which does not stop growing and, indeed, has taken on a life of its own, a life that demands to be recognized.
This project has been conceived as a place where such intellectual identities and endeavours can be recognized, valued, and nurtured.
The term is, of course, ambivalent, intentionally so. Is it, then, only scholar who employs a DIY approach and conducts their work outside of mainstream academia? Can’t it also imply scholarship on DIY, as an object of study? Well, here, it’s a little of both. More the former than the latter, to be sure.
Throughout the nineties, I participated in the DIY punk movement. In line with its ideology, I was no mere consumer but a protagonist of the experimental and innovative cultural and artistic production that typified the movement. As such, I did all the things that punks of my time did, which is to say that I wrote a zine, had a book distribution, put on shows, recorded albums, went on tour, and engaged in passionate debates whose stakes, in retrospect, seem much lower today than they did at the time. My knowledge of DIY, then, is firsthand. As such, my current writing on the topic has a testimonial dimension. This is the case with the blog and its serial novels. Although fictionalized, the content is largely shaped by my own experiences not only as a punk but as an autodidact and free-floating intellectual, whose intellectual formation and research is irreconcilably at odds with academia in its current articulation in the Global North. This is not to say that a subjective approach cannot produce knowledge on a topic but, rather, to acknowledge that it does so in a different way than research that aspires to greater objectivity.
For more objective writing on DIY, closer to my research as an intellectual historian, I have created a “junkdrawer” section on this website. It is where the short, nonfiction pieces live, not just the ones on DIY, but all the other loose fragments, the ones that don’t fit anywhere else, the broken shoestrings, the half-unravelled spools of thread, the unsent postcards, the dead letters, the patches that never got sewn onto our leather jackets.
The podcast, however, is a different story. It is where DIY becomes an approach to scholarship, to the production of knowledge. Leaning heavily into my formation as an intellectual historian, both inside the narrow confines of academia and as an autodidact out in the open air, the podcast explores topics, both large and small, in intellectual history, the wayward trajectories of currents of thought as they develop throughout time and as they migrate across geographical boundaries and adapt to new contexts.
In both cases, DIY as either an approach to knowledge production or an object of inquiry, the endgame is the same: to support and insist and inspire other people in comparable situations in their respective intellectual trajectories. In many ways, the current situation of universities, in their transformation from humanistic to enlightenment to technocratic and now to thoroughly neoliberal institutions, whose characteristics are largely determined by the market and the needs of the private sector, has obligated us all , all of us who care about the world of ideas, all of us who want to better understand our place in history and role in society, to become, to greater or lesser degrees, DIY scholars. This project is for you, that is, for us.
​
​