Independent publishing might seem like a small element of Indonesia’s cultural landscape: limited print runs, niche books, and audiences that rarely extend into the mainstream. Yet these spaces can matter precisely because they make room for voices, ideas, and forms of cultural expression that have little place elsewhere.

This matters in Indonesia today, where civic space is increasingly constrained and marginalised communities, including queer people, face growing stigma, scapegoating, and political hostility. In this context, publishing becomes not only about circulating books but a way of sustaining communities, and creating spaces where people can think, disagree, and imagine different forms of social and political relations.

In this episode of Talking Indonesia, Dr Clara Siagian speaks with Syarafina, co-founder and commissioning editor of Cahyati Press, an independent publishing practice based in Bali. Cahyati publishes books, zines, and artist books by writers, poets, artists, and researchers, particularly queer, working-class, and BIPOC voices that are often overlooked by mainstream publishing.

Syarafina reflects on her twelve-year journey through independent publishing and on why Cahyati Press came into being. For her, independent publishing is less about size than editorial freedom to publish work because it matters, even when it defies common literary classification or when it is not commercially viable.

That freedom takes on particular significance when we talk about queer publishing. As LGBTQ+ people in Indonesia face increasing stigma and political scapegoating, Syarafina argues for the importance of documenting queer lives in all their complexity. This means communicating not only stories of violence and survival, but also stories of friendship, family, work, migration, desire, boredom and joy. Publishing, in this sense, can be a quiet form of resistance which encompasses preserving stories, creating memory, and allowing people to recognise that they are not alone.

The conversation also takes us beyond Indonesia. Cahyati Press is part of a growing international network of independent publishers, artists, writers, booksellers and cultural organisers across Southeast Asia, Australia, Europe and beyond. Rather than seeing Indonesia simply as a place where international researchers and artists come to study or work, this network points to Indonesia as a place from which connections are being forged, and cultural conversations are being shaped.

Finally, we discuss what independent publishing might offer academics: an opportunity to experiment with shapes, audiences and methods, and to imagine forms of knowledge production beyond the rigid conventions of academic publishing.

In 2026, Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Clara Siagian from University College London, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, and Tito Ambyo from RMIT.

The problem of Australian knowing and engaging Indonesia, as our closest neighbour, has vexed successive Australia governments ever since Keating called for Asian literacy in the 1980s. Toward that end, we have seen intermittent policy interventions recognizing the strategic importance of what has come to known as Australia’s “Asian capabilities”.

This includes a National Asian Language and Studies program in the 1990s, a 2012 white paper under the Gillard government and in 2015, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade unveiled the New Colombo Plan which provides grants and high prestige scholarships to Australian undergraduates studying in the region.

And yet Australia’s quest for “Asian Capabilities” has been nonetheless been marked by declining numbers in Asian language learning, closures of Asian studies departments and programs at senior high school and in universities and with repeated warnings from educators, language teachers, high schools and universities about the catastrophic decline in student numbers.

An important element of Australia’s relationship to Asia has been forged through study abroad programs which send hundreds of Australian students to Asia each year. The Australian Consortium for In Country Studies Indonesia Studies, known as ACICIS, is the longest running facilitator of these kinds of programs to Indonesia, having facilitated some 5000 of Australian students to Indonesian universities since it was established nearly 30 years ago. This month also marks the launch of a new book on the generational impact of these programs called Experiencing Indonesia: 30 years of ACICIS published by ANU Press and edited by Kirrilee Hughes, Kate Naidu and David Reeve.

Today I’m speaking to Liam Prince, Director of the ACICIS program based at the University of Western Australia about the future of Australia’s Asia and Indonesia capabilities.

Indonesia is home to some of the largest stretches of tropical rainforest left on Earth — and to a growing community of people willing to put themselves on the line to defend it. But across the archipelago, environmental activists are increasingly finding that the sharpest threat they face isn't out in the field. It's in the courtroom.

In this episode, we're looking at how the law itself is being turned against environmental defenders in Indonesia, especially through what are known as SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation. What are these suits, and what is the intention behind them?

To unpack this, I'm joined by Austin Jenish. Austin recently finished his studies, and his path into these questions didn’t begin in a lecture or a research program, but with a study abroad program that took him to Indonesia. He came to the country's legal system and its environment out of genuine curiosity, and followed that interest far enough to start writing about it. So, we connected through an article Austin wrote for Earth.org on SLAPP which can be found at https://earth.org/how-malicious-lawsuits-are-silencing-climate-activists-in-indonesia/.

Austin holds degrees in both law and genetics from Monash University and now works at a commercial litigation firm, but his engagement with environmental issues is a longstanding passion. He's served as a conservation status assessor with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, contributed environmental law and policy work to NGOs including the Institute for Criminal Justice Reform in Jakarta, and through Monash's law clinics helped draft a framework for environmental litigation and supported the Cook Islands in the UN's plastic pollution treaty negotiations.

What does it mean to believe in ghosts? It turns out that's exactly the wrong question.

In this special episode of Talking Indonesia, co-hosts Tito Ambyo and Jamie Edmonds sit down together not as interviewer and guest, but as co-editors who have spent months immersed in a collection of essays on ghosts and haunting in Indonesia. The result is something that is a bit different than the usual podcast interview: two scholars thinking aloud about what the ghostly has done to them.

They move between the personal and the theoretical. Jamie's childhood on a road called Whispering Woods, his years navigating psychosis and hallucination, and the way ghost stories kept refusing to let him stay on the outside. And Tito's discovery, buried in a Dutch East Indies newspaper, that his grandfather hosted a radio programme about spirituality, which was a revelation that arrived mid-thesis, mid-life, with the force of a haunting.

The episode also serves as a guide to the Inside Indonesia special edition on ghosts that Tito and Jamie co-edited: essays on pulung gantung in Gunung Kidul, haunted manuscripts that resist digitisation, headless soldiers whose presence keeps colonial violence from being forgotten, female dancers whose spectral power is reshaping Indonesian cinema, and journalists learning to take seriously the tree that refused to be felled. What emerges from all of it is not an argument for or against the existence of ghosts, but something more interesting: a case for sitting with what we cannot explain, and for the kind of knowing that begins with admitting we do not know.

In this episode of Talking Indonesia, Tito Ambyo and Jamie Edmonds explore what ghosts teach us about Indonesia — and about ourselves.

Jamie Edmonds is Director of the Critical Languages Institute, Associate Director of the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. His research focuses on Islam, popular culture, and the supernatural in Indonesia.

In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Dr Tito Ambyo from RMIT, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, and Dr Clara Siagian from University College London.

Airlangga Julio - The People versus Fadli Zon

Last month marked the 28th anniversary of the mass rioting, that shook Indonesia's capital, Jakarta, and other major cities for several days in mid-May 1998. There was widespread looting and arson, which resulted in the deaths of over a 1000 people and large-scale property damage and capital flight. Soon, it was also revealed that incidents of sexual assaults and rapes had occurred on a massive scale.

The rioters’ targets were overwhelmingly properties and businesses owned by ethnic Chinese Indonesians. The victims of sexual violence and rapes were also, although not exclusively, Chinese, Indonesian women.

In the following days, Suharto’s authority became fractured and his regime fell, ushering in the Reformasi era. Key actors involved in these events of almost three decades ago, are today at the centre of power in Indonesia. Prabowo Subianto, now President, was then Commander of Kostrad, the Army Strategic Reserve Command, and Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, now Defence Minister, was then Commander in charge of Jakarta, Pangkoops Jaya. At the time, Sjamsoeddin’s failure to protect the capital was singled out for condemnation. Around the fringes of these events was also Fadli Zon, a long-time supporter of Prabowo, who by his own account, was close to the now president as the events of May 1998 played out.

When he was appointed the Minister of Culture in Prabowo’s first cabinet in 2024, Fadli Zon immediately embarked on a controversial project to rewrite Indonesia’s official history for school curricula. He had a particular interest in the way in which the history of May 1998 would be represented. This became a focus in his public statements about the project, including challenging the historical account of these events accepted by the official government-appointed task force set up after the riots, and by rigorous academic research. Then in June 2025, Zon went on the record questioning if sexual assaults and rapes had taken place. A few months later, a group of advocates, including some of those directly involved in the fact-finding investigation and who provided support to victims at the time, filed a case against the minister in the Jakarta Administrative Court. Following several months of evidence, the trial concluded in April 2026.

What was the nature of their case against Minister Zon? How did the court respond? And what implications might this case have for the broader struggle for human rights protections and democracy in Indonesia right now?

In this week's episode Jemma chats with Airlangga Julio, associate lawyer at AMAR Law Firm and Public Interest Law Office and a member of the Tim Advokasi Untuk Demokrasi (TAUD, Advocacy Team for Democracy).

In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Tito Ambyo from RMIT and Dr Clara Siagian from University College, London.

Every year on the 8th of June, World Ocean Day calls us to reflect on the vital role our seas and waterways play in sustaining life on Earth. Yet for most of us, the ocean remains something we observe from a distance, and more recently, a source of anxiety as sea levels rise, waters warm, and marine ecosystems collapse under the pressures of the Anthropocene.

For Indonesia, a nation that defines itself as a maritime and archipelagic country, this distancing carries a particular irony. Despite the political rhetoric of "returning to the sea" that depicts the ocean as the future of our civilisation especially during Jokowi’s administration, Indonesia's relationship with its waters has been largely shaped by an impulse to conquer, control, and extract.

It is within this tension that the stories of Indonesia's Sea Nomad peoples become both urgent and instructive. Communities such as the Orang Suku Laut and the Sama-Bajau have maintained deep cultural, social, and economic ties to the ocean across generations. For them, the sea is home, identity, and livelihood, not something to be managed or tamed. Yet these communities are increasingly marginalised, their connection to the sea is systematically eroded for economic development, conservation, and paternalistic policies enacted in the name of their own welfare.

In this episode, Dr Clara Siagian speaks with Dr. Wengki Ariando, a scholar-activist from the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). He is also a part of Sea Nomads Contact Group, a collective of researchers and community representatives with a mission to translate research into advocacy and activisms for the political recognition of Sea Nomads in Southeast Asia.

Drawing from more than a decade working with and learning from Sea Nomad communities in Indonesia, Wengki unpacks who Orang Suku Laut and Sama-Bajau are, the nature of their relationship with the sea and the very real threats they face today. Crucially, Wengki also introduces the concept of fluid or rhizomatic territory and Aquapelagos to challenge the dominant, land-based notion of territory as something fixed and bounded, and views the ocean and the land as separate entities. For Sea Nomads, whose lives and identities are organised around movement in water, and between water and land, such conventional territorial frameworks render them invisible and rightless. A rhizomatic understanding of territory, by contrast, opens space for recognising the legitimacy of Sea Nomads' claims to their waters, and with it, the political recognition they are long overdue.

In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Clara Siagian from the University of College London, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, and Tito Ambyo from RMIT.

When we talk about improving education in remote or indigenous communities, we usually start with the wrong questions. We ask: what's missing? What needs to be fixed? But what if the problem isn't a lack of education but a failure to recognise the rich opportunities for education that are already there?

In this episode, Dr Murni Sianturi challenges some of the most deeply held assumptions about schooling, knowledge, and what it means to learn. Her research in West Papua pushes back on three pervasive myths: that indigenous parents don't care about their children's education, that learning only happens in formal schools, and that indigenous communities are problems to be solved rather than partners to be heard.

Children in West Papua face additional challenges around their identity and how to navigate their Indonesian selves with their indigenous identity. At the heart of Murni's work is a deceptively simple argument — that education works best when it's built on real relationships, when schools treat families as partners rather than outsiders, and when children are allowed to explore all aspects of their identity so they know who they are and where they're going.

This is a conversation about West Papua, but it's really about something much bigger: whose knowledge counts, and who gets to decide how children are educated.

As an Indigenous scholar and lecturer in education with over six years of professional academic experience, Dr Murni Sianturi has built a strong track record in leading research. She completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales with a prestigious Scientia PhD Scholarship. Currently, she leads a competitively funded Australia–Indonesia international research project with Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia (UPI), funded by the Indonesian Government and co-funded by Excelsia University College. She has shared her expertise in Indigenous education and educational technology through invited talks, keynotes, plenary sessions, and international conference presentations. Her publications include two books and 21 peer-reviewed articles, seven of which appear in top-tier journals such as Pedagogy, Culture & Society and Education and Information Technologies, contributing to scholarship that influences both research and practice.

In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Dr Clara Siagian from the University of College London, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, and Dr Tito Ambyo from RMIT.

Image: Child in school uniform besides child in traditional Papua dress. Photo by Asso Myon/Unsplash.

If you studied Indonesian history in school in the 1990s, you learned to divide the archipelago's past into neat chapters: Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms, then Islamic sultanates, with a brief “transitional period” somewhere in between. Colonial archaeologists created these categories in the nineteenth century, and they've structured Indonesian historiography ever since — shaping not just how we study ancient sites, but what counts as history in the first place and what we archive and remember for the future.

But visit Sendang Duwur, a sixteenth-century Islamic compound in East Java, and these categories start to fracture. Here, soaring temple gates with Hindu iconography guard an active mosque. Pilgrims climb stairs designed like pathways to heaven, passing through spaces that refuse singular religious meanings. The site has been continuously inhabited, renovated, and reinterpreted for five centuries, yet archaeological scholarship tends to freeze it in time.

What if this framework blinds us to how Javanese communities actually understand sacred space? What recourse do scholars have to resist these inherited categories and imagine decolonial futures for Indonesian archaeology?

In this week's episode, Tito chats with Panggah Ardiyansyah, a Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield, whose research challenges us to read Indonesian antiquities through Indonesian epistemologies. Drawing on his paper Fragment and Evocation: Hindu-Buddhist Hauntings in the Islamic Complex of Sendang Duwur published in the journal Art History in 2025 as part of a special edition on decoloniality, Panggah argues that the concept of kramat — sacred sites imbued with ancestral power — offers better tools for understanding sites like Sendang Duwur than the binaries we inherited from colonial scholarship.

In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jemma Purdey Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Dr Clara Siagian from the University of College London, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, and Dr Tito Ambyo from RMIT.

Rassela Malinda – Papua, development and politics from below

In his inauguration speech in October 2024 President Prabowo Subianto reiterated his campaign pledge to “achieve food security in the shortest possible time”. He was not the first Indonesian president to make such a declaration. For Jokowi’s administration too and now Prabowo’s, West Papua occupies a central place in its ambitions to achieve both food and energy security, with the rollout of massive sugarcane and palm oil plantations to meet increasing biofuel targets, as well as mega rice production.

These plans involve the clearing and development of hundreds of thousands of hectares of forests, the customary lands of the indigenous peoples of these regions. Resource extraction at such scale by the state and the corporations is backed by military force, often rendering the indigenous communities helpless to respond. But some are fighting back. So just what recourse do the customary owners of the forests of Papua have to resist and take a stand, in the face of such powerful forces?

In this week's episode Jemma chats with Rassela Malinda, a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne who lived and worked with indigenous communities in Papua and whose research gives us rare insights into their struggles from below. She previously worked with the NGO Yayasan Pusaka Bentala Rakyat whose report she draws on in this podcast.

In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Tito Ambyo from RMIT and Dr Clara Siagian from University College, London.

Image 1: Indigenous activists protesting Merauke food estate project in front of Defence Ministry in Jakarta – October 16, 2024 (Photo by Afriadi Hikmal/Greenpeace)

Rural Java has changed enormously over the past half-century. Girls now finish school, women hold community leadership positions, and dual incomes have become the norm rather than the exception. And yet, many Javanese women will tell you they still cook every meal, manage the household, and show up visibly as devoted wives, on top of everything else.

It is this gap between what has changed and what has not that drives the research of Dr Linda Susilowati, a lecturer at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana in Salatiga. Drawing on her doctoral fieldwork in Wonogiri, Central Java with over two hundred women, men, and community members across generations, Linda traces how gender roles have been renegotiated, and how cultural expectations have proven far more resilient than economic or infrastructural change alone.

In this episode, recorded in the spirit of International Women’s Day, Dr Clara Siagian chats with Linda about generational shifts in rural Javanese women’s lives, the enduring weight of kodrat (predetermined nature) and kewajiban (obligation), and how Julia Suryakusuma’s concept of State Ibuism appears in contemporary Indonesia.

In 2026, the Talking Indonesia podcast is co-hosted by Dr Clara Siagian from the University of College London, Dr Jacqui Baker from Murdoch University, Dr Elisabeth Kramer from the University of New South Wales, Dr Jemma Purdey from the Australia-Indonesia Centre, and Tito Ambyo from RMIT.