Lecture
Curating Feminist Knowledge: Feminist Influencers and Young Womanhood in Indonesia
- Date
- Thursday 17 September 2026
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.21
Abstract
Drawing on youth-led participatory action research conducted between 2023 and 2025 and the work of Muslim feminist influencer Kalis Mardiasih, this paper examines the role of feminist influencers in curating and circulating feminist knowledge among young women in Indonesia. I argue that feminist influencers in Indonesia perform a curatorial practice: one constituted by ongoing tension between platform logics and feminist commitments, and oriented not toward self-promotion but toward expanding access to feminist knowledge for those outside institutionalised feminist circles. The paper situates this argument within Indonesia's media ecology, where Islamic digital cultures dominate public discourse on gender and where feminist knowledge remains structurally inaccessible to most young women. Drawing on Chandra Talpade Mohanty's concept of "insurgent knowledge" and Wu-Ouyang's personal curation as a communicative act, I propose that feminist influencer practices produce an orientation, directing young women toward their own experience as knowledge worth analysing. Two youth collaborators' accounts illustrate how this orientation takes hold differently depending on what each brings to the encounter, and how it continues to circulate well beyond the original encounter.
Biography
Dr Annisa R. Beta is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, working across Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Her research examines digital cultures, youth, gender, and the politics of knowledge in everyday life. From 2023 to 2025, she was an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow leading a project on digital citizenship and young Indonesian women's empowerment. With Associate Professor Inaya Rakhmani (Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia), she is now co-leading a research project on digital alternative knowledge. Annisa is the author of Pious Girls (Routledge, 2024) and is currently completing Empowerment Elsewhere, which develops the concept of "the elsewhere" as a site of feminist knowledge-making. She co-founded Anotasi and the Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka/Open Ethnography Network (JET). You can reach her at annisabeta.com.