
Dr. Inaya Rakhmani is the Director of Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia. Rakhmani uses cultural political economy to study media and communications as well as knowledge and information in order to explain broader capitalist changes. She is deeply concerned about social sciences, social inequalities and democratic developments. She has been researching the role of social and mass media in hindering democratic developments; in Indonesia, with comparisons to India, Egypt, and Turkey (from 2015 to now). She is concerned with the fact that social sciences and humanities are at times disconnected to the needs of the people, both in long term analysis and short term responsiveness. Since 2014, she has been mapping the structural barriers of social scientists to carry out critical research in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. She has also been actively engaging with local, national, and global policy makers to make the issue better known. She believes that social problems are multi-dimensional, hence collaboration with inter-disciplinary approaches are crucial. Her work has been publishes at at the Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, the Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia (TRANS) and she also the author of ‘Mainstreaming Islam in Indonesia: Television, Identity and the Middle Class’ published by Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. She is currently finalising leading a study on social sciences and policy responses in Southeast Asia (eleven countries) in partnership with the Global Development Network and the IDRC. She is also an honorary member of the Indonesian Young Academy of Sciences (ALMI).

Suraya Afiff earned her doctorate in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an associate professor in the anthropology department and the chair of the Indonesian Anthropological Association (AAI) for the years 2021-2026. She investigates human-environment interactions using a political ecology approach. Her research interests include the problem of unequal access to and control over land and natural resources, right-based development, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), and Indonesian agrarian and environmental movements. Migration-Plantation nexus, as well as agrarian reform and social forestry, agrarian conflict resolution, peat forest management and forest fires, and the problem of displacement in development projects, are among her current research topics.

Diatyka earned her PhD at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne. Her doctoral research investigates the expansion of precarious work arrangements tied to the gig economy and its effects on workers’ subjective experience, identity formation, and organising propensity in Indonesia. She is also a faculty member at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia. She published in outlets like the Jakarta Post, the Conversation, Indonesia at Melbourne, and others. One of her articles, ‘Jakarta’s Precarious Workers: Are They a New Dangerous Class’? was published by Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2017.

Evi is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the Department of English, Universitas Negeri Malang (UM), Indonesia. She is also a member of Indonesian Young Academy of Sciences (ALMI). Her current research includes GESI in film education in Indonesia, GEDSI in Indonesian higher education and research ecosystem, marriage patterns and social change in Indonesia, and representations of gender in Indonesian popular culture.

Endah Triastuti receives her PhD degree from University of Wollongong, NSW Australia. She is now a lecturer at Department of Communications at Universitas Indonesia since 2009. Her research interests are media anthropology, digital ethnography, as well as media and minority.