This study aims to deepen our understanding of the impact of digital technology on niqabi (women who wear the niqab), as the distinction between private and public spaces becomes increasingly blurred. Digital technology has created a new public space where niqabi can engage in networking, interaction, and economic development through previously inaccessible business activities. Maintaining private spaces has become a shared belief among them, leading them to navigate the challenges of distinguishing between private and public spheres. Grounded in the Salafi manhaj (methodology or pathway) they follow, niqabi recognize public spaces as areas outside their homes where they must limit their presence and regulate their behaviour when compelled to be there. They also identify which public spaces they can tolerate engaging with. In contrast, private space refers to the confines of their homes, where they are encouraged to spend their time and develop their capabilities. Digital technology has emerged as a conduit for niqabi who wish to remain in private spaces while accessing modern public spheres. Utilizing a qualitative approach with narrative inquiry, this research explores the subjective experiences of niqabi women in Surakarta, Indonesia, who run online businesses from their homes. Through the theoretical framework of pious agency proposed by Saba Mahmood, the study reveals that practices of piety do not hinder agency; instead, they serve as a foundation for the emergence of new forms of agency that are consciously enacted through digital media. This research contributes to an enhanced understanding of the relationship between gender, religiosity, technology, and public space in contemporary Muslim society.
The Indonesian labour landscape has changed rapidly in recent years. Factors have included the Covid-19 pandemic, increasing digitalisation, the controversial 2020 Omnibus Law on Job Creation and platform work. This article provides an overview of changes in the Indonesian labour market since the last decades, with a focus on post-Covid-19 transformations. It introduces the concept of “fluid work arrangements” where the boundaries between the digital and physical workplace and between the office and home are becoming increasingly porous, with higher degrees of individual autonomy on one end of a dynamic spectrum, and higher control of institutional frameworks on the other. Fluidity can be seen spatially: the line between “office” and “private” space often blurs as people increasingly work from home. The fluidity is also temporal, as the employee can organise their work more effectively in terms of time and coordinate it better with their family’s work schedule in fluid work arrangements. This paper points out the opportunities and pitfalls such fluid work arrangements offer, especially for women. I argue that the digital sphere is a pathway to “digital hoped-for futures,” which are to be understood by accumulating various forms of capital in Bourdieu’s sense. Based on this framework, the three articles of this special issue, which examine female platform motorcycle-drivers, influencers in the writer-sphere and niqabi (women wearing the niqab), are introduced.
The gig economy is frequently framed as offering flexible work arrangements, a narrative that has attracted increasing numbers of women workers. This study examines the gendered experiences of women working as ojek online drivers in Indonesia, situating the premise of flexibility within broader structures of labor precarity. Based on face-to-face, semi-structured interviews conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic between July and October 2020 in five Indonesian cities: Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Jakarta, Makassar, and Medan, the study interrogates how flexibility is marketed, perceived, and lived by women drivers. Contrary to dominant claims that flexibility enables women to gain greater economic autonomy, the findings show that societal and cultural expectations continue to be embedded within gig work arrangements. These gendered assumptions, further amplified by platform algorithms, obscure women’s economic dependence on gig income and legitimize precarious working conditions, thereby limiting women drivers’ ability to realise the promised flexibility and economic autonomy.
This article explores how Indonesian digital creators use digital technologies, focusing on five prominent female content creators who share a passion for reading, writing, and bookstagramming. It investigates how these women are shaping new forms of workplace engagement in the digital age through bookstagramming and related activities, such as illustrating books, Muslim activism, travel blogging, and marketing. Methodologically, the study draws on in-depth interviews with selected bookstagrammers alongside an analysis of their digital content. In so doing, the study seeks to answer the following questions: How do female bookstagrammers navigate digital bookstagramming workplaces? What challenges and opportunities do they face? What strategies do they employ to navigate this landscape? The analysis is informed by the conceptual integration of gender, social media, and aspirational labor as formulated by Brooke Erin Duffy, which provides a lens for understanding how participants use digital technologies to challenge traditional gender norms and power structures within the creative industries. In addition, digital labor studies provide a framework for understanding the participants’ experiences as digital creators within the platform economy, including the monetization of their work and its implications for workplace equity. By combining digital content analysis with in-depth interviews, the study finds that female bookstagrammers navigate bookstagramming as an evolving digital workplace, marked by a gradual blending of personal and professional spheres, with motivations shifting from personal to career-oriented. In this process, they face significant challenges in maintaining bookstagramming as professional work, including government and Instagram bans, unequal profit distribution among female bookstagrammers, the pitfalls of the capitalist system, and marginalization by Indonesia’s literary criticism community. To address these challenges, they develop strategies, such as cultivating small communities, creating mutual support and tagging campaigns, and increasing their involvement in broader literary programs.
While the political dimension of informality is well established in critical scholarship, it is often overlooked in analyses of how platformization reshapes the formal-informal divide. As a result, debates on platform work in informal economies tend to emphasize economic and regulatory outcomes, narrowing the analytical scope of the issues at stake. This article approaches platform work not only as a labor arrangement but as a site of political subject formation and contested legitimacy. It revisits the notion of “platformalization”—commonly used to describe the formalizing effects attributed to platform work in the Global South—and examines how digital platform workers develop political capacities and claims-making practices vis-à-vis both state institutions and platform authorities. The argument draws on long-term participatory fieldwork with Grab motorbike drivers in Vietnam, a context marked by a high rate of informal labor and an authoritarian regime. I introduce the concept of a “three-body problem” to theorize how platformization reconfigures urban power relations. The entry of platform intermediaries destabilizes the historically bilateral relationship between the state and informal workers, generating a triangular arena of negotiation among workers, platforms, and public authorities. This configuration produces new forms of mediation, contestation, and recognition that reshape the performative practices of citizenship and statecraft in contemporary Vietnam. This article thus makes two contributions: first, it advances a political theory of platform-driven formalization centered on subjectivation, legitimacy, and claims-making; second, it proposes a triangular analytical framework for understanding platform power that moves beyond state-market binaries. Together, these contributions reposition platformization as a transformation of political relations as much as of labor regimes in the Global South.
The article highlights figures of intellectual women who, through their educational backgrounds, writings and conferences, as well as their cultural activities, represent a significant part of the new Vietnamese elites emerging in the first half of the 20th century. The autobiographies and biographies of these women complement the articles and texts they wrote in the press and books of the time, shedding light on their journeys. Drawing on these documentary sources, the author explores themes such as girls' education and access to professions like journalism, writing, and publishing. Regarding education, she emphasizes the importance of family strategies-especially those of illiterate mothers-and the determination of the female students themselves. The article presents and analyzes portraits and life paths of women journalists, writers, and publishers, assessing their rich and varied contributions to both the modernist and feminist struggles. It offers initial interpretations and evaluations of the nature of women's and feminist thought and activities in these fields, as well as the achievements of this first wave of Vietnamese feminism, which forms an integral part of the modernist and anti-colonial struggle, while retaining its distinct originality and specific goals.
This article focuses on the history of elites in Vietnam through the biography of Gaston Pham Ngoc Thuan (1914-2002) who, coming from the Francized Cochinchinese bourgeoisie, close to the ConstitutionalistBui Quang Chieu, joined the Communist Party for nationalist purposes. It aims to understand how he, the French citizen, Catholic, educated in France and volunteer to defend France in 1939, joined the resistance in 1945 and joined the Vietnamese Communist Party (PCV). Vice-president of the Nam Bo Resistance, he joined North Vietnam after 1954 and worked as a diplomat for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), notably as ambassador to East-Berlin when the wall was built. This biographical study is a continuation of the work on the Cochinchinese elites by Pierre Brocheux through the careers ofBui Quang Chiru and Gilbert Chieu. The study of Gaston Pham Ngoc Thuan's particular itinerary aims to demonstrate the complexity of the formation of Vietnamese elites and the diversity of intersecting networks, beyond social, political, cultural and religious affiliations, and this, at the scale of families, regions, country and beyond.
This issue pays tribute to Pierre Brocheux (1931-2022), a major historian of Vietnam whose work has profoundly shaped the fields of colonial history, rural studies, and the study of Vietnamese elites. Known especially for his influential biographies of Ho Chi Minh, Brocheux has left a lasting impact on multiple generations of scholars. The volume opens with a previously unpublished 2006 interview, in which Brocheux recounts his personal and intellectual journey between Saigon and Paris, having witnessed key historical events such as the August 1945 Revolution and the 1968 Tet Offensive. The contributions in this issue engage critically with different aspects of Brocheux's scholarship. They examine the emergence of academic knowledge on Indochina at Paris-VII University (Agathe Larcher-Goscha), the significance of a southern Vietnamese perspective and the regional scope of his work (Pascal Bourdeaux), and the role of peasants in the contemporary urban development of Hanoi, echoing Brocheux's earlier research on the Mekong Delta during the colonial era (Gis & egrave;le Bousquet). Extending his interest in Vietnamese elites, the volume also explores the roles of women (B & ugrave;i Tr & acirc;n Phuong) and the Cochinchinese bourgeoisie through the biography of Gaston Pham Ngoc Thuan (Claire Thi-Li & ecirc;n Tran) in the development of Vietnamese nationalism. The issue concludes with a rare and insightful testimony on the fall of Saigon in April 1975, offered by a journalist and a historian of Vietnam-then young volunteers with the American Friends Service Committee-who were among the few Westerners to remain in the country afterApril30 (Paul & Sophie Quinn-Judge).
The Mekong Delta played a central role in the pioneering work of historian Pierre Brocheux. This region, and western part Cochinchina in particular, was the place where the economic dependencies produced by colonial capitalism were most evident. Maintaining that social movements are the real driving force of history, he has never ceased to take an interest in the rural proletariat, describing the struggles waged in the name of national liberation and social revolution. From this specific territory, Pierre Brocheux subsequently broadened his gaze to embrace the wider social history of Vietnam and the independent nations of Southeast Asia. This study, written as a tribute, presents some of the facets of a historian marked by Marxism, the anti-colonialist cause and the fight against the culturalist prejudices of his time. It shows how the Mekong Delta remained a constant space of struggle in his studies. This essay then asks how the present-day historian experienced the dramatic events of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. Lastly, it looks at the developments that led Pierre Brocheux to become a historian of the global South.
Thirty photographs taken in Pursat in 1896 by colonial inspector Andr & eacute; Salles offer a snapshot of the capital of this Cambodian province. They show a powerful place, the Preah Khan and the banyan tree housing a local divinity, as well as the Cambodian governor's household. These rare images reveal the power relationships between Cambodian dignitaries and the French colonial administration in the provinces shortly before the coup de force by which the French took control of the government and administration of the Khmer kingdom. They show the importance of patronage networks in the choice to side with the colonizer. Most Pursat dignitaries who supported the French sought to assimilate the colonizer's cultural codes. However, their mastery of these codes remained too superficial, and most were dismissed in the aftermath of the coup de force.
This article provides an account of the major developments in the teaching and research on Vi & ecirc;t Nam and Indochina at the University of Paris-VII from the 1970s to the early 2000s. It shows how four notable historians played a dynamic role in this process as its architects and guides-Jean Chesneaux, Pierre Brocheux, Daniel H & eacute;mery and Georges Boudarel. Of particular importance are the epistemological challenges they encountered and the roles they played in stimulating research in Vietnamese studies, driven by the question of how does one practice a type of history in synch with the times, militant and scientific at the same time. The impact of the ideological and political storms taking place in Southeast Asia at the time and in particular in Vi & ecirc;t Nam during the last three decades of the 20th century directly influenced the development of Vietnamese studies at this University.
This article focuses on the history of elites in Vietnam through the biography of Gaston Phạm Ngọc Thuần (1914-2002) who, coming from the Francized Cochinchinese bourgeoisie, close to the Constitutionalist Bùi Quang Chiêu, joined the Communist Party for nationalist purposes. It aims to understand how he, the French citizen, Catholic, educated in France and volunteer to defend France in 1939, joined the resistance in 1945 and joined the Vietnamese Communist Party (PCV). Vice-president of the Nam Bộ Resistance, he joined North Vietnam after 1954 and worked as a diplomat for the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), notably as ambassador to East-Berlin when the wall was built. This biographical study is a continuation of the work on the Cochinchinese elites by Pierre Brocheux through the careers of Bùi Quang Chiêu and Gilbert Chiêu. The study of Gaston Phạm Ngọc Thuần’s particular itinerary aims to demonstrate the complexity of the formation of Vietnamese elites and the diversity of intersecting networks, beyond social, political, cultural and religious affiliations, and this, at the scale of families, regions, country and beyond.
The Mekong Delta played a central role in the pioneering work of historian Pierre Brocheux. This region, and western part Cochinchina in particular, was the place where the economic dependencies produced by colonial capitalism were most evident. Maintaining that social movements are the real driving force of history, he has never ceased to take an interest in the rural proletariat, describing the struggles waged in the name of national liberation and social revolution. From this specific territory, Pierre Brocheux subsequently broadened his gaze to embrace the wider social history of Vietnam and the independent nations of Southeast Asia. This study, written as a tribute, presents some of the facets of a historian marked by Marxism, the anti-colonialist cause and the fight against the culturalist prejudices of his time. It shows how the Mekong Delta remained a constant space of struggle in his studies. This essay then asks how the present-day historian experienced the dramatic events of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. Lastly, it looks at the developments that led Pierre Brocheux to become a historian of the global South.
