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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.

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 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]

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]