I am a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, working across Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

My work explores how digital cultures, youth, movements, gender, and the politics of knowledge intersect in everyday life. I am interested in how people create meaning, care, and critique through digital worlds and collective practices. I co-founded Anotasi and Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka/Open Ethnography Network (JET) to support inclusive, critical, and collaborative ways of mobilising knowledge.

I am currently an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellow (2023–2025), leading a project on Digital Citizenship and Girls’ Gender Empowerment (DE230101204), examining how young women in Indonesia use digital tools and platforms to sustain movements and imagine collective futures. This builds on over a decade of research and teaching that brings together insights from cultural studies, media, and feminist inquiry to understand the intersections of media technologies, gender, and everyday politics.

Before joining the University of Melbourne, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore, where I also completed my Ph.D.

My first book, Pious Girls (Routledge, 2024), examines how piety and femininity shape new forms of political subjectivity in contemporary Indonesia.

I’m currently working on my second monograph, Empowerment Elsewhere, based on my engagement with young feminists in Indonesia since 2018. The book proposes the idea of the elsewhere, initially explored in a book chapter titled “Girls’ Digital Citizenship Elsewhere” in The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies (2024). Elsewhere is a term I use to describe peripheral, hybrid, and often precarious spaces of collective learning, and it functions as a heterotopic counterpublic and a site of radical political hope. It refers to the spatial, social, and epistemic formations that emerge outside dominant centres of power and knowledge production, yet remain entangled with them. It is not merely a marginal or liminal location but a relational and affective space that takes shape through social media, community networks, and feminist knowledge-making and circulation.

My academic publications span journal articles, edited volumes, and collaborative research reports on digital cultures, youth, movements, feminism, and the politics of knowledge in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. My work has appeared in journals such as New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, Continuum, International Communication Gazette, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Girlhood Studies, as well as in edited collections published by Routledge, Bloomsbury, Edward Elgar, Springer, and Hong Kong University Press.

I am committed to inclusive and collaborative knowledge-making. I co-edit and contribute to open and feminist ethnographic publications, including A Guide to Researching with Young Women and Panduan Etnografi Terbuka #1. I am also the Editor-in-Chief of Anotasi.org, where I support the publications of over 300 articles written by emerging and established public intellectuals in Indonesia.

I founded criticalgirlhoodstudies.org, a platform that extends my DECRA project on digital citizenship and girls’ empowerment. It seeks to establish critical girlhood studies as an interdisciplinary subfield within girlhood and youth studies, centring perspectives from Indonesia and Southeast Asia. The site publishes essays and reflections written by young women in Indonesia, which I edit and curate alongside academic pieces, fostering dialogue between scholars, practitioners, and emerging thinkers.

My essays and commentary have appeared in The Conversation, Inside Indonesia, South China Morning Post, Magdalene, ISEAS Perspective, and The Jakarta Post, among others. I often write about digital cultures, gender, youth, and the politics of knowledge in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Recent pieces explore young women’s participation in empowerment programmes, Muslim women’s online activism, and shifting representations of girlhood and digital citizenship. My writing has been republished and cited across media platforms, including Vice, Third World Resurgence, and The Jakarta Post.

I have been fortunate to receive several fellowships that have shaped my research and collaborations across regions. I am an ARC DECRA Fellow (2023–2025) and Senior Fellow at the Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia (2022–2026). My earlier work was supported by an Asia Study Grant Fellowship at the National Library of Australia (2022) and a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley (2016). I also participated in the Global Undergraduate Exchange Program (2008) at Utica College, New York. I received my BA and MA from Universitas Indonesia.

I often speak about digital activism, youth movements, gender, and the politics of knowledge in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. My research and commentary have been featured in international and national media outlets, including ABC News, Deutsche Welle (DW), Lianhe Zaobao, NHK, Project Multatuli, SBS, and Narasi.

For media enquiries, events, or interviews, please contact me at annisa.beta@unimelb.edu.au.

_{Updated 23 Nov 2025}