Yatun Sastramidjaja is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, affiliated with the AISSR program group Moving Matters. She obtained her 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, she also held multiple visiting fellowships at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, for research projects on 1) the digitally mediated ecosystem of contemporary youth movements, 2) cyber troops and online political influence operations, in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries (a topic elaborated in two subsequent projects funded by KNAW-grants), and 3) social media and the youth vote in Indonesia's 2024 elections. Overall, her recent research 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, she is developing new research that decentres the digital, examining how activists adapt their technological practices - and recombine digital, analogue, and material technologies - and thereby craft alternate infrastructures of resistance, in the face of digital repression. This research asks how political and techological activism converge in the process of infrastructural interventions, and how this engenders a novel kind of technopolitics and technopolitical utopian praxis.

Yatun Sastramidjaja is the director of the Master’s Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She is also 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. Her 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

• “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.
• “Social Media and the Youth Vote in Indonesia’s 2019 and 2024 Elections”: examines how first-time and second-time voters (aged 18-25) in Indonesia use social media in the upcoming 2024 elections, compared with the 2019 elections. 
• “Digitally-mediated youth movements in Southeast Asia”: examines how youth activism transforms at the interface of virtual and material spaces, focusing on cross-sectoral and cross-national connections.

Research grants & honours

• 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, “Navigating ‘Evil with Spiked Eyes’:  An Ethnography on How the Orang Rimba Hunter-Gatherers Organize their Education to Address Pressures of Assimilation”, 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.