“Making Knowledge, Making History: Producing the Indonesian Past, Present and Future”
May 26-30, 2026 (Virtual)
The American Institute for Indonesian Studies (AIFIS) and Michigan State University (MSU) Asian Studies Center will convene the 6th annual AIFIS-MSU Conference on Indonesian Studies from May 26-30, 2026. Presented in a bilingual and virtual format, the conference is designed to bring together scholars working across geographic and disciplinary frameworks to explore the evolving field of area studies research in Indonesia.
This year’s conference theme, “Making Knowledge, Making History: Producing the Indonesian Past, Present and Future,” invites scholars, students, artists, and practitioners to explore how Indonesia has been imagined, studied, and narrated across time. Knowledge and history are never neutral–they are made, remade, and contested through the shifting dynamics of power, place, and perspective. We seek to open a space for critical reflection on how diverse disciplines of studying Indonesia have been constructed: by whom, for whom, and to what ends. From colonial archives to digital media, from indigenous epistemologies to regional and global scholarship, the production of knowledge about Indonesia reveals enduring tensions between authority and agency, memory and forgetting, locality and universality. How have academic disciplines, state institutions, and communities contributed to the shaping of Indonesia’s intellectual landscapes? How might alternative ways of knowing—oral traditions, government databases, visual cultures, statistical analyses, performative practices, activist archives, or legal discourse—challenge established narratives and foreshadow new futures
We welcome papers and presentations from across disciplines and subjects, including but not limited to:
- History, psychology, anthropology, and sociology
- Environmental studies, geography, disaster management
- Literature, linguistics, language learning, and cultural studies
- Business, economic analysis, and legal studies
- Education, pedagogy, public health and welfare studies
- Labor and migration
- Energy, science and technology
- Religious studies and philosophy
- Art, media, and performance studies
- Policy analysis and political science, and regional studies [including ASEAN]
- Family, gender and sexuality
- Museum, heritage, indigenous, and archival studies
Proposals for panels and presentations engaging with this theme or on any other theme focusing on Indonesia and its place in the world are welcomed. Abstracts are accepted in Indonesian and English.
Important dates:
Deadline for Submission of Paper Presentations:
February 8, 2026 – 11:59pm ET
Deadline for Organized Panel, Roundtable and Book Talks:
March 22, 2026 – 11:59pm ET
For further information about the conference, please visit the following link: https://asia.isp.msu.edu/conferences/aifis-msu-conference/
