Concepts

Religious influencers

Religious influencers is a term I coined to address the growing number of social media microcelebrities whose online personas fuse religious, commercial, and political interests (Beta, “Commerce, Piety, and Politics,” New Media & Society, 2019). The concept extends existing scholarship on influencers and microcelebrity by foregrounding how religion, particularly its practices and displays of piety, functions as a constitutive element of the attention economy in Muslim-majority societies. Religious influencers deploy and accumulate financial, cultural, and social capital through popular platforms while strategically showcasing religious virtue.

The concept was developed further in Pious Girls (Routledge, 2024) and in a chapter examining how these influencers navigate success and modesty in Indonesia’s modest fashion industry (Beta, “Making Piety Visible,” 2025).

Productive, pious feminine subject

I propose the idea of productive, pious feminine subject in Pious Girls: Young Muslim Women in Indonesia (Routledge, 2024) to describe the contemporary ideal young Muslim woman in Indonesia: a woman, wife, and mother who is also an entrepreneur capable of being productive, efficient, and pious.

This subject position is constructed through the convergence of the New Order’s state-sponsored gender ideology of kodrat wanita (the idealised naturalness of women’s domestication), the depoliticisation of Indonesian women and Islamic organisations during the same period, and the contemporary neoliberal ethical regime justified by Islamic and state authorities and mediated by social media. The concept articulates the specific set of expectations and tensions about young Muslim women engendered by a global assemblage that mediates the relationship between Indonesian state policies and the flows of the creative economy, Islamic revival, and the discourse of female empowerment.

Muslimah intimate public

Muslimah intimate public is a concept I developed to extend Lauren Berlant’s notion of the intimate public to the context of young Muslim women in Indonesia (Beta, “The Muslimah Intimate Public,” Asiascape: Digital Asia, 2020). It describes the public formed when young Muslim women share intimate details of personal experience with strangers who assume emotional literacy of one another’s encounters with power, desire, and discontent. In this intimate public, new creative and intimate forms of dakwah (proselytisation) activism emerge that encourage religious self-improvement and engender a sense of togetherness that is affective and opinionated but rarely appears political in conventional terms. The concept is central to Pious Girls (Routledge, 2024), where it frames the analysis of how young Muslim women’s groups operate as political actors through sites and practices not typically recognised as political.

Politics of youth survival

I propose this in “Politics of Youth Survival in Times of Crisis” (Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2020) to describe how uncertainty and insecurity have been established as the “normal” condition of young people’s lives in Indonesia under neoliberal governance. The essay examines the discursive shift in idealised youth citizenship, from the founding myth of the nationalist pemuda (youth) to the contemporary figure of the entrepreneurial, self-responsible millennial, and the state’s ambivalent treatment of its young citizens, exemplified by the appointment of millennial aides alongside a lack of structural support for young workers during COVID-19. The politics of survival names the condition in which young Indonesians are caught between the inherited obligation to safeguard the nation and a neoliberal ethics of self-responsibility that individualises precarity, revealing the gap between the state’s imagination of the ideal youth citizen and the multiple, ongoing crises that structure young people’s actual lives.

Elsewhere

Elsewhere is a concept I’m currently developing to describe the peripheral, hybrid, and often precarious spaces of collective learning that take shape outside dominant centres of power and knowledge production, yet remain entangled with them (Beta, “Girls’ Digital Citizenship Elsewhere,” The Routledge Companion to Girls’ Studies, 2024).

The elsewhere is not merely a marginal or liminal location but a relational and affective space that emerges through social media, community networks, and feminist knowledge-making and circulation. It functions as a heterotopic counterpublic and a site of radical political hope.

The concept is central to my second monograph, Empowerment Elsewhere, which examines the spatial, social, and epistemic formations that young feminists in Indonesia inhabit and create.

Jocular visuals

Jocular visuals is a concept I developed with Ian Rafael Ramirez (Beta & Ramirez, “Performing Gendered Youth Citizenship through Jocular Visuals,” Journal of Asian Studies, in press, 2027) to describe images, videos, signs, dances, and illustrations that deploy humour and playfulness to challenge dominant masculine norms of what counts as legitimate political expression. Drawn from the 2019 and 2020 student-led protests in Indonesia, jocular visuals are characterised by their use of minor aesthetic categories such as cuteness, frivolity, vanity, and promiscuity to make political claims. They function as performative mockery of “serious” and “formal” modes of doing politics: self-deprecating, gendered, and vernacular, they simultaneously demand to be taken seriously and refuse the terms on which political seriousness is conventionally granted. In doing so, jocular visuals open up space for young women and gender non-conforming youth to enact alternative modes of citizenship that legitimise what is otherwise dismissed as vain, unserious, or inappropriate.

Subfield

Critical girlhood studies

Critical girlhood studies is an interdisciplinary subfield I am working to establish within girlhood and youth studies, centring perspectives from Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

The intellectual case for the field is set out in “Shifting the Paradigm: Rethinking Research on Indonesian Girls and Young Women” (Girlhood Studies, 2025), co-authored with Rayfienta K. Gummay, Siti Ainun Nisa, Shaila Tieken, and Andrea Andjaringtyas Adhi. Through a scoping review of research and grey literature from 2013 to 2022, the article argues that existing scholarly and civic engagements with knowledge about Indonesian girls are constricted by narrow framings, particularly around sexuality and reproduction, and that these framings preclude more varied possibilities for change. The article calls for critical approaches that involve interrogating assumptions, contextualising girlhood, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration to understand the diverse realities of girls and young women in Indonesia and the Global South.

Approaches

Knowing responsibly

Knowing responsibly is an approach to studying girls and young women in the Global South originally developed by Marissa Saraswati in her graduate thesis which we subsequently published in the article “Knowing Responsibly: Decolonizing Knowledge Production of Indonesian Girlhood” in Feminist Media Studies (2021). The article argues that Indonesian girls have been rendered “out of space” in Indonesian feminist studies and “out of time” in Western-centric Girls Studies, either positioned as objects of development or glossed over entirely.

To address the damaging epistemic effects of research on Third World girls, we propose knowing responsibly as a decolonial and transnational framework built on attention to:

• the conditions of knowing, which requires researchers to acknowledge how their social positions and positionalities enable and shape the knowledge they produce, particularly given the intersecting marginalities of age, gender, race, nationality, and religion that Indonesian girls occupy;
• the intentions of knowing, which calls for vigilance against the way benevolent research objectives can blur our vision and lead us to regulate girls’ agency rather than support it;
• and the material effects of knowing, which draws on Gaile Pohlhaus Jr.’s “knowing without borders” and “epistemic gathering” to insist that knowledge production is a materialised practice with consequences for its subjects, and that recognising those consequences is essential to decreasing the harm our research may produce.

Youth digital citizenship in Asia

In a co-authored article with Audrey Yue and Elmie Nekmat (Yue, Nekmat & Beta, “Digital Literacy Through Digital Citizenship,” Media and Communication, 2019), we argue that digital citizenship is not another dimension or axis of citizenship but a practice through which civic activities are conducted, demonstrating this through fieldwork with young Muslim women in Indonesia and youth minorities in Singapore.

Audrey Yue and I further our approach to young people’s digital citizenship by locating it in Asia to challenge the reduction of digital citizenship to western liberal-democratic principles (Yue & Beta, “Digital Citizenship in Asia: A Critical Introduction,” International Communication Gazette, 2022). We identified four dominant thematic clusters in digital citizenship research and proposed a fifth: digital citizenship as a contextual practice dependent on local histories and conjunctures of social forces. This reframing is grounded in the recognition that in Asia, citizenship claims can be enacted without formal rights, and that contexts become key sites to develop new practices that challenge liberal notions of citizenship.

With Ian Rafael Ramirez, I am extending this line of inquiry to young protestors’ street politics through the concept of jocular visuals, which theorises playful visual expressions of political dissent as performances of gendered youth citizenship (“Performing Gendered Youth Citizenship through Jocular Visuals,” Journal of Asian Studies, forthcoming 2027).

Digital feminist public pedagogy

It is an approach I examine in “Fight the Patriarchy: Digital Feminist Public Pedagogy and Post-Feminist Media Culture in Indonesia” (Gender in an Era of Post-Truth Populism, Bloomsbury, 2022) to describe how young feminists in Indonesia use social media platforms, particularly Instagram, as sites of participatory learning, knowledge-sharing, and critical engagement with gendered power relations beyond formal educational institutions. Following the work of criticial education scholars, public pedagogy here refers to forms and processes of education occurring outside of formal schooling; a feminist public pedagogy emphasises participatory learning, personal experience, and critical thinking. When these practices go digital, platforms like Instagram become spaces where young people connect, educate one another, and engage with feminist issues with fewer of the constraints that formal institutions impose.

Focusing on the feminist Instagram account Lawan Patriarki (@lawanpatriarki), the chapter argues against generalising the label “post-feminist” to these accounts without attending to the cultural, historical, and socio-political conditions that shape how young women practise feminism in specific locations. It proposes that post-feminism be reconsidered transnationally, recognising that the ambivalence and lack of coherence in these accounts’ feminist narratives are not signs of depoliticisation but products of the specific conjuncture within which Indonesian young feminists operate, including the erasure of progressive women’s history in educational institutions and the absence of sex education for young people.

Young women’s online identity

Studying young women’s identity formation online is an approach I outline in “Young Women and Identity Formation on Social Media: Lessons from Indonesia” (Handbook of Children and Youth Studies, Springer, 2024). The chapter proposes that studies of youth identity online need to be open to differences, ambiguity, and contradictions rather than assuming coherent or stable identity positions. Through case studies of Indonesian young women’s collective identity politics on social media, the chapter demonstrates how the negotiation between self-construction and domination plays out in digitally mediated contexts and argues for attending to the specificities of how cultural, historical, and political settings shape the terms on which young women construct their sense of self.

Conjunctural analysis of religious influencers

Conjunctural analysis of socially mediated cultural politics is an approach I developed for studying the cultural and political significance of religious influencers: social media microcelebrities whose online personas fuse religious, commercial, and political interests (“Commerce, Piety and Politics,” New Media & Society, 2019). Drawing on Stuart Hall’s conjunctural analysis and Christine Hine’s ethnography for the internet, the approach proposes that religious influencers be analysed as key actors of a conjuncture rather than subsumed under one specific social or cultural location. In “Religious Influencers and Socially Mediated Cultural Politics” (Research Handbook on Social Media and Society, Edward Elgar, 2024), I explain the necessity of sensitivity to the socio-cultural and political contexts within which influencers operate, rather than relying on data scraping or technological determinism; a genuine understanding of religious institutions, orthodoxy, and how worldly success and religious commitment are entangled; and critical attention to the gendered dynamics that determine what gets to count as politically influential. The approach insists on being multi-sited, multi-modal, and responsive to changing conditions, recognising that an analysis of religious influencers at one political moment will necessarily differ from another.