1) Wider Research Context
Indonesian students have been narrativized as the vanguard of democratic change leading to the fall of Suharto’s 32-years-long authoritarian regime in 1998. As the third largest democracy by population is rapidly moving again towards authoritarian rule, students retain their crucial role in organizing political opposition, despite the increasing hostility of online environments, where they have concentrated their efforts over the past years. This project foregrounds an anthropological approach towards Indonesian students’ activism since the 1998 political reform by bringing together the literature on Indonesia’s student movement and emerging digital practices to explore activists’ struggles over creating activist publics.
2) Hypotheses
In this project I suggest that student activism in Indonesia has been contained by a language of idealization and by commonly-held assumptions of digital activism as being less real compared to street politics. Despite the unprecedented circulation of audio-visual content on social media, and the prevailing faith in the virality of the message, I suggest that students’ activism is more than a sum of their campaigns. Instead, I advance an understanding of students’ social media practices as means of enacting political subjectivity that cannot be read in terms of formal politics.
3) Approach
I approach student activism as a trove of experimental practices with online publics. In addition to online research of the digital platforms of activists, this project involves three consecutive periods of ethnographic fieldwork in six educational centers across the archipelago, targeting activist students in three prominent fields of activism in Indonesia: Islam, nationalism, and environmentalism. This account of contemporary activist engagement will be complemented by an investigation of national and local media archives as well as the private (online) archives of activists themselves.
4) Level of Originality
In this project I develop the concept of activist publics to explore the changing communicative logics that digital media have brought to student-led activism and their relation to prevailing discursive tropes and normative assumptions that circumscribe students’ political expression. In addition to an ethnographically constructed documentation of new experimental media practices (conceptualized as the e-archive), I seek to analyze activist media as constituent of alternative genres of activism that challenge hegemonic discourses and prevailing social orders.
5) Primary Researchers Involved
The project’s PI is Dayana Lengauer who holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Vienna. Dr. Martin Slama, senior researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is the principal mentor. Co-mentors are Bart Barendregt, Leiden University; Carla Jones, University of Colorado, Boulder; and Noorhaidi Hasan, State Islamic University Yogyakarta.

Projektleitung:
Dayana Lengauer

Projektlaufzeit:
01.12.2027-30.11.2030

Finanzierung:
FWF Esprit