I am an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the AISSR program group Moving Matters. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, my work is grounded in political anthropology with interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary orientations. My recent research has focused on the interplay between repression, resistance, and resilience in a world where power, politics, and struggle move into the cybersphere, with real-world effects.

Currently, I am the Principal Investigator of the project Activist Techtopias: Crafting Alternate Infrastructures of Resistance in Asia, or AlterTech (2026-2031), funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant. AlterTech is an ethnographic study of how rights and grassroots movements in Asia navigate deepening digital repression by experimenting with new practices and uses of technologies (‘technological craftmanship’), both to dodge the repression and to disrupt the infrastructures that enable it. It investigates how political and technological action intersect and how movement infrastructures are reconfigured in a context where state surveillance and surveillance capitalism coalesce. By decentring the digital in our concept of technology, and exploring how technologies are crafted and infrastructures are reassembled bottom-up, the project aims to uncover how a novel type of technopolitics and utopian imaginaries evolve in practices of resistance and everyday struggle. Inspired by decolonial epistemology and using a multi-modal collaborative methodology, AlterTech seeks not only to analyse these processes but also to actively engage in them.

I obtained my PhD at the University of Amsterdam, with a dissertation on the Indonesian student movement, and conducted postdoctoral research at the Erasmus University Rotterdam on Indonesia’s globalizing heritage industry, before returning to the University of Amsterdam. Between 2020-2024,  I held multiple visiting fellowships at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, for research projects on 1) digitally mediated youth movements, 2) cyber troops and online influence operations (a topic elaborated in two subsequent projects funded by KNAW-grants), and 3) social media and Indonesia's 2024 elections.

I am also the director of the Master’s Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, a member of the board of the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EuroSEAS), and a member of the board of the magazine Inside Indonesia. My book on the Indonesian student movement and an edited volume on digital technologies and democracy in Southeast Asia are forthcoming.

Administrative role

• Programme Director Master’s Cultural and Social Anthropology

Research methods

• Ethnography, qualitative methods
• Digital ethnography, digital mixed-methods

Current research projects

• "Activist Techtopias: Crafting Alternate Infrastructures of Resistance in Asia"; a multi-modal, multi-sited, and multi-scalar study of how activists across Asia craft alternative technological infrastructures to resist digital repression and imagine new technopolitical futures.
• “Cyber Troops and Computational Propaganda in Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Public Opinion Manipulation”: brings together researchers in social sciences, humanities, and computational science, from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, to investigate the dynamics and networks of online political influencing.

Research grants & honours

• 2026: European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant for AlterTech.
• 2024: Visiting Fellowship at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore, for research project on “Social Media and the Youth Vote in Indonesia’s 2019 and 2024 Elections”.
• 2022: Research funding from Onderzoeksfonds KNAW Instituten for research project on “Cyber Troops and Computational Propaganda in Southeast Asia: A Comparative Study of Public Opinion Manipulation”, with Ward Berenschot.
• 2021: Visiting Fellowship at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore, for research project on “Cyber Troops and Computational Propaganda in Southeast Asia”. 
• 2021: Research funding from the Global Digital Cultures RPA, University of Amsterdam, for research project on “P(R)OTESTAS: The Politics and Aesthetics of Digital Authoritarianism and Protest in the Global South”, with Julienne Weegels and Luisa Gonzalez Valencia.
• 2020: Research funding from the Anticipation Grant Indonesia-The Netherlands, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), for research project on “Cyber Troops and Public Opinion Manipulation: A Mixed-Method Study of Social Media Propaganda in Indonesia”, with Ward Berenschot, Wijayanto, and Ismail Fahmi.
• 2020: Visiting Fellowship at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore, for research project on “Viral Citizenship: Digital Youth Activism and Reconfigurations of Democratic Citizenship in Southeast Asia”.

Involved in Research Priority Area

• Global Digital Cultures

Courses

Current courses:

• Practicing Ethnography
• Designing Applied Fieldwork  
• (Anti-) Utopian Tensions in a Polycrisis World
• RMSS Workshop Digital Methods
• (Research) Master thesis supervision 

Past courses:

• Youth Cultures in a Transnational Context
• Contemporary Debates: Youth
• Youth and Health
• Political Anthropology
• Mobility, Migration and Security
• Age, City and Work
• Anthropology in Action

PhD Supervision

•  
• Andreas Stoiber, "'I Spy with My Little Eye': Synchronising Civl Sousveillance Practices in the Mediterranean Border Zone", in progress.
• Fatjri Nur Tajuddin, "Community in Transition: Navigating Food Security in Agricultural Transformation in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia", in progress.
• Saur Marlina Manurung, “Co-Animating Becoming: Collaborative Ethnography with the Orang Rimba, a Contemporary Hunter-Gatherer Community in Sumatra, Indonesia”, in progress.
• Remco Vermeulen, “Colonial Heritage Engagement in Postcolonial Indonesian Cities”, in progress.
• Arifah Arum Candra Hayuningsih, “The Javanese Diaspora in New Caledonia: From Indentured Labourers to a Fractured Community”, completed April 2023.