mHealth Innovation in Asia: Grassroots Challenges and Practical Interventions

This book offers a detailed account of a range of mHealth initiatives across South, Southeast and East Asia. It provides readers with deep insights into the challenges such initiatives face on the ground, and a view of the diverse cultural contexts shaping strategies for overcoming these challenges. The book brings together various discussions on the broader mHealth literature, and demonstrates how a research focus on diverse Asian contexts influences the success and/or failure of current mHealth initiatives. It also highlights the important roles social scientists can play in advancing theoretical approaches, as well as planning, implementing and evaluating mHealth initiatives. The book is a valuable resource for project planners, policy developers in NGOs and government institutions, as well as academics, researchers and students in the fields of public health, communications and development studies

Hijabers on Instagram: Using Visual Social Media to Construct the Ideal Muslim Woman

This article studies uses of Instagram by members of Indonesia’s Hijabers’ Community. It shows how hijabers employ Instagram as a stage for performing middle-classness, but also for dakwah (“the call, invitation or challenge to Islam”), which they consider one of their primary tasks as Muslims. By enfolding the taking and sharing of images of Muslimah bodies on Instagram into this Quranic imperative, the hijabers shape an Islamic-themed bodily esthetic for middle class women, and at the same time present this bodily esthetic as a form of Islamic knowledge. The article extends work on influencer culture on Instagram, which has considered how and whether women exert control over their bodies in post-feminist performances of female entrepreneurship and consumer choice on social media. In it, we argue that examining the “enframement” of hijaberness on Instagram show it to be both a Muslim variant of post-feminist performances on social media, and a female variant of electronically-mediated Muslim preaching. That is, hijabers’ performances of veiled femininity structure and are structured by two distinct fields - a dynamic global digital culture and a changing field of Islamic communication – and point to a “composite habitus,” similar to that identified by Waltorp

A rare view: Barbara Hatley’s new book documents a career-long study of, and passion for performance in Central Java

Javanese Performances on an Indonesian Stage: Contesting Culture, Embracing Change, is Barbara Hatley’s first book about the performing arts in Indonesia, a topic that piqued her interest while undergoing a masters program at Yale University in the late 1960s. In this sense, it is a landmark study, for Hatley has since become very well known in Indonesianist circles, especially among those with an interest in matters of culture, popular and elite. Until recently, her writings on Indonesian performing arts have only been available in the form of journal articles and book chapters..

Book Review: "Metal Rules the Globe: Heavy Metal Music around the World". Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

It is rare to find an anthology that realizes the possibilities of the form. We tend to regard our edited collections as lesser siblings, and forget their special value. But at times, a subject seems to require an edited collection much more than it does a classic monograph. So it is with the subject showcased here, which concerns the global circulation, performance and consumption of heavy metal. This is a relatively new and emerging body of work, hitherto scattered disparately in the broader popular music studies, but quickly gaining status as a “studies” with the establishment of a global conference, a journal, and publication of this anthology, all in recent years. Metal Rules the Globe took the editors’ a decade to compile. That they have thought deeply about how they want the collection to speak shows through in the book’s thoughtful arrangement and design, and in the way in which they draw on the contributions herein to develop for the field a research agenda that will take it forward..

Longing Band play at Beautiful Hope

This article enquires into the contextual dimensions of Indonesian consumerism by presenting the rise to national fame of provincial boy band, Kangen (Longing) Band. The case of Kangen Band suggests that Indonesian consumerism entails new ways of heralding the masses that rely on and play with old generic terms, kampungan (hick-ish) and ‘Melayu’ (Malay). It also reveals some of the specificities of the Indonesian consumerist environment, in which ring back tones, pirate recordings and corporatized fandom are important resources in the formation of consumer subjectivities