Edited volume, in progress

Edited by Merlyna Lim & Annisa R Beta

This edited volume gathers the often-dismissed stories of Indonesian women scholars across archipelagic, diasporic, and disciplinary boundaries. Through autoethnographic and autohistoria- inspired chapters that move between memory and embodied knowing, the contributors trace the histories etched in their sense of self: journeys of care, joy, precarity, dissonance, and refusal that shape how they think, write, teach, organise, and survive. Together, their stories form portals into broader questions of belonging, knowledge, power, and labour. We braid the personal, the political, and the scholarly together to make space for difficult revelations, including the uncomfortable coexistence of privilege and marginalisation, of classed (dis)advantage and mobility, but also gendered and racialised vulnerability. This volume turns towards such contradictions as sites and practices of honesty and radical hope: grounded in lived experience, enacted through saying the usually unsayable, and refusing the inevitability of the idea that the structures that lift us must also wound us.

The use of autoethnography in this volume refers not merely to writing the self but to situating lived experience as an approach that foregrounds the entanglement of biography, social structure, and everyday frictions. We are also inspired by Gloria Anzaldua’s autohistoria, which expands personal narrative into a relational, communal, and imaginative mode of knowledge making. Drawing from both approaches, this volume is a rare attempt to trace the formation of Indonesian women’s scholarship through first-person accounts that recognise the self as shaped by, but not reducible to, colonial legacies, classed histories, and gendered labours.

The volume brings together Indonesian women scholars whose disciplinary trajectories, academic experiences, and personal histories diverge and intersect, showing how their life stories have shaped their work and the changing landscape of Indonesian scholarship. The collection will be bilingual (English and Bahasa Indonesia), and we seek an open-access publication pathway so the book can be accessible to aspiring Indonesian women scholars as well as educators and researchers, particularly in a period marked by increased intellectual mobility.

Additionally, each chapter will also be accompanied by a visual response created by Merlyna. These illustrations will not simply “decorate” the text, but will function as parallel narrative forms— another mode of knowing that translates, refracts, and extends each author’s story. Developed in dialogue with contributors’ essays, the graphic pieces will add an affective and interpretive layer to the volume, foregrounding the relational, embodied, and creative dimensions of knowledge production–thereby turning autoethnographies into autoethnographics.