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In modern history, the availability and affordability of a range of commodities that cater to the specific needs of consumers have permeated globally. While most brands that dominate global markets remain 'Western', their spread and adoption in Asia have been met with various specific cultural responses. Such is the case with Indonesia, a Muslim-majority country and the largest economy in Southeast Asia. There has been rising halal consumerism in at least the past two decades, which some have understood as a response towards global economic changes. This article aims to understand the meaning of halal, or permissible according to Islamic doctrines, as felt by young Muslims (18–35 years) in the capital city of Jakarta. It analyses semi-structured interviews with 120 young Muslims in Jakarta's capital city in 2018 and 2020. It finds that the meaning of halal in Indonesia is shaped by and practised within the material conditions of global market capitalism. This article finds that halal practices include the production and consumption of halal goods and services, where Muslim workers and consumers strive to maintain Islamic lawfulness within neoliberal market settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past three decades, there has been a rise in young academy movements in the Global North and South. Such movements, in at least Germany and the Netherlands, have been shown to be quite effective in connecting scientific work with society. Likewise, these movements share a common goal of developing interdisciplinary collaboration among young scientists, which contributes to the growth of a nation's--but also global--scientific endeavors. This paper focuses on the young academy movement in the fourth-largest country hosting the biggest Muslim population in the world, which is also the third-most populous democracy: Indonesia. We observe that there has been rising awareness among the young generation of scientists in Indonesia of the need to advocate for the use of sciences in responding to upcoming and current multidimensional crises. Science advocacy can be seen in their peer-based identification of Indonesia's future challenges, encompassing the fundamental areas for scientific inquiry, discovery, and intervention. We focus on the Indonesian Young Academy of Sciences (ALMI) and its network of young scientists. We describe ALMI's science communication practice, specifically SAINS45 and Science for Indonesia's Biodiversity, and how they have been useful for policymakers, media, and school engagements. The article closes with a reflection on future directions for the young academy movement in Indonesia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, politicians – particularly of the conservative kind – have been influential in binding together political support based on identity. Taking the case of the most populous Muslim country in the world and the largest democracy in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, this study analyses how Islamic identity has been instrumental during moments of political consolidation. It focuses on the way the political campaign industry uses social media to appeal to an otherwise fragmented 'floating ummah' (Hadiz, V. R. (2018). The 'floating' ummah in the fall of 'Ahok' in Indonesia. TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 7, 271–290), is an assemblage of believers unified momentarily against an abstract oppressor. The mobilisation of the floating ummah with social media, this article argues, has provided opportunities for marginal politicians to gain standing in an intra-elite struggle over power dominated by the oligarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising wealth and social inequalities around the world place great pressure on social researchers to interpret and explain the impact. However, it is equally important to recognise that scientists too have been part of the reproduction of social inequalities. This article expands on Burawoy's (2015) appeal to social scientists to acknowledge that social inequalities are not only external to the social science community specifically – and the scientific community more generally – but they also pervade academic labour and the way universities are managed and reformed. By taking the case of Indonesia, the largest economy in understudied Southeast Asia, this article reveals types of social inequalities reproduced and sustained through policies and practices within universities. These inequalities are the exclusionary effects of internationalisation, selective inclusion and corporatist bureaucracies, as well as regional inequalities in terms of infrastructure and capacity. We problematise the detrimental effects of marketisation in higher education on academic imagination and how it extends authoritarian developmentalism (1966–1998) to suit neoliberal demands. The article ends with propositions on how academics from the Global South can better understand their social position in an increasingly networked yet disconnected world skewed by multiple configurations of social inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are approximately 36,600 religious boarding schools in Indonesia accommodating a student population of 3.4 million. Traditional religious boarding school is one of the most significant contributors to waste generation after housing. This study is aimed to measure waste generation and the potential to implement anaerobic digestion in traditional boarding schools. At Al Hikam Boarding School, with a population of 265 residents, the average daily waste generation was measured at 33.6 kg/day, with organic waste constituting 41.8%. Over three months, the study included the stages of seeding, acclimatisation, and operation of anaerobic digestion using organic waste generated by the boarding school and traditional buffet. With an input of 7.6 kg/day, the results showed that organic waste used had a pH, total solid (TS), volatile solid (VS), chemical oxygen demand (COD), and temperature of 6.1±0.38, 25±0.092%, 95±0.0054%TS, 453±188 g/L, and 29.5±1.12°C, respectively. The digester reported a volatile solid destruction (VSD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) reduction of 91±0.015% and 89±0.081%, respectively. This produced biogas volume and methane yield of 805±219 L/day and 292±130 L.methane/kg.VS. So, anaerobic digestion with a Toren Biogas reactor is the recommended technology to manage organic waste at traditional boarding schools, with a potential reduction factor of 54%.There are approximately 36,600 religious boarding schools in Indonesia accommodating a student population of 3.4 million. Traditional religious boarding school is one of the most significant contributors to waste generation after housing. This study is aimed to measure waste generation and the potential to implement anaerobic digestion in traditional boarding schools. At Al Hikam Boarding School, with a population of 265 residents, the average daily waste generation was measured at 33.6 kg/day, with organic waste constituting 41.8%. Over three months, the study included the stages of seeding, acclimatisation, and operation of anaerobic digestion using organic waste generated by the boarding school and traditional buffet. With an input of 7.6 kg/day, the results showed that organic waste used had a pH, total solid (TS), volatile solid (VS), chemical oxygen demand (COD), and temperature of 6.1±0.38, 25±0.092%, 95±0.0054%TS, 453±188 g/L, and 29.5±1.12°C, respectively. The digester reported a volatile solid destruction (VSD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) reduction of 91±0.015% and 89±0.081%, respectively. This produced biogas volume and methane yield of 805±219 L/day and 292±130 L.methane/kg.VS. So, anaerobic digestion with a Toren Biogas reactor is the recommended technology to manage organic waste at traditional boarding schools, with a potential reduction factor of 54%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is increasingly urgent to consider how work conditions have shifted with neoliberal transformations and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. The precarious nature of work faced by millennials is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, but few scholars consider how spirituality is intimately connected to the multiple labour market challenges in the Global South. This paper uses sequential mixed methods to depict the social realities of millennials living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Importantly, precarity has become more entrenched into the nature of work during the pandemic, through the passage of the 2020 Job Creation Law. Precarious millennials in this Muslim-majority city use spiritual lexicons as coping strategies, as these help urban millennials to accept (ikhlas) the gradual disappearance of financially rewarding jobs and dwindling prospects for upward mobility in the formal economy. While spiritual narratives might seem religiously specific, they are useful for both Muslim and non-Muslim millennials to respond to broader and systemic job insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the influence of the social sciences on policymaking during the first wave (2020 to 2021) of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. It explains two broad orientations of the social sciences: technocratic, which was incorporated into elite-driven institutionalized responses that, at times, did not fully address urgent healthcare needs; and critical, which provided timely digital health information for the wider public. On a practical level, though, the two orientations can be intertwined. The article argues that further understanding of social scientists' relationship to power is needed in efforts to make the social sciences more beneficial to the people rather than to the elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented challenges to higher education. This paper explores the challenges Indonesian female academics encountered during the pandemic in which the boundaries between home and work were further blurred. Accordingly, the gender gap was further widened as unpaid and unacknowledged academic and domestic work disproportionately affected women. This paper draws on data gathered from survey, diary studies and in-depth interviews with female academics in the social sciences and humanities. It examines how Indonesian female academics juggled domestic and professional work at home, caring duties both at home and work, and shouldering administrative workloads. In addition, findings reveal that female academics found new meanings in their academic work and the importance of caring and collective solidarity, especially in a crisis such as the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All around the globe, populism has become increasingly prominent in democratic societies in the developed and developing world. Scholars have attributed this rise at a response to the systematic reproduction of social inequalities entwined with processes of neoliberal globalisation, within which all countries are inextricably and dynamically linked. However, to theorise populism properly, we must look at its manifestations in countries other than the West. By taking the case of Indonesia, the third largest democracy and the largest economy in Southeast Asia, this article critically analyses the role of the political campaign industry in mobilising narratives in electoral discourses. We use the Gramscian notion of consent and coercion, in which the shaping of populist narratives relies on mechanisms of persuasion using mass and social media. Such mechanisms allow the transformation of political discourses in conjunction with oligarchic power struggle. Within this struggle, political campaigners narrate the persona of political elites, while cyber armies divide and polarise, to manufacture allegiance and agitation among the majority of young voters as part of a shifting social base. As such, we argue that, together, the narratives – through engineering consent and coercion – construct authoritarian populism that pits two crowds of "the people" against each other, while aligning them with different sections of the "elite." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on neo-liberal reform of Indonesia's state universities, using Michael Burawoy's approach to the division of sociological labour in particular and social science in general. It examines the relationship between neo-liberal market imperatives and authoritarian bureaucratic legacies that not only curtail the development of theoretically engaged and socially relevant scholarship but also shape knowledge production through the marketisation of technocratic research. This article shows how, counter-intuitively, the rise of managerial power linked with neo-liberal policies has prolonged the mechanics of bureaucratic administration that Indonesian state universities inherited from the authoritarian New Order regime. This has resulted in a condition where insular academic practices perpetuate technocratic social science research driven by market mechanisms. The article argues that acknowledging the unequal status accorded to instrumental as opposed to reflexive knowledge production is crucial to understand the failures of neo-liberal reform in post-authoritarian Indonesia state universities. It concludes that a thorough reconsideration of the institutional settings that have systematically constrained critical and professional social science in Indonesia is necessary before any attempts at structural changes that enable the sort of deep engagement with the public that Burawoy envisages for a critical social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project – the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media platforms, algorithms and content. Third, the article examines how the democratization of media is a key element in the struggle for social justice. It argues that effective media access – in terms of distribution of media resources, even relations between spaces of connection and the design and operation of spaces that foster dialogue, free speech and respectful cultural exchange – is a core component of social progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the modes of consolidation between the dynamic practices of commercial television and the rising Islamic manifestation among urban, middle-class Indonesians. Focusing on the most-consumed type of television programming in the country, the sinetron (television drama), it describes media-economic factors that have led to the multiplication of Islamic symbols in television. An image of Islam that is unobjectionable to both the vocal, moralist Muslim audience and the general, heterogeneous audience has received a privileged position in prime time television. Business deals between media organisations that have become more stable blow the wave towards "mainstream Islam", which reflects a symbiosis between growing Islamic influences and commercialisation in Indonesia's television industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of media industrialization on mediated religious expression all over the world has been substantial, and this study tries to understand the Indonesian case by looking at the intersections between commerce and Islamic expression. Focusing on Indonesian Islamic sinetron (soap operas), we shall see that contrasting ideological motivations among producers have resulted in particular narratives within their content. Despite these peculiarities, all narratives use Islamic teachings to address societal issues experienced by middle-class Indonesian Muslims. This, in turn, projects an image of Indonesian Islam that blurs existing political divisions in Indonesian society. This article argues that the sinetron plots are inherently a commercialization of da'wah (proselytizing of Islam). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]