Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Martin Slama is a senior researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, and regularly lectures at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. He graduated from this department with a PhD thesis about the online practices of young internet users in Indonesia. While still writing up his dissertation, he expanded his research focus to diaspora communities of Hadhrami-Arab descent in Southeast Asia that play a salient role in the region’s Islamic landscape. Developing this research focus further earned him the Austrian Programme for Advanced Research and Technology (APART) grant of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. This grant enabled him to write a post-doctoral thesis (habilitation) about Indonesian Hadhramis’ elite networking, constructions of authority, gender order, and internal frictions. More recently, he combined his expertise on Islam in Southeast Asia and the anthropological study of new communication technologies by examining the varied Islamic uses of social media in Indonesia. He is currently further expanding on this theme of being digitally pious, while revisiting the (re-)positioning of Hadhramis in Indonesia’s entangled religious and political fields. At the same time, he is developing new projects on forms of religiosity, the politics of space and socio-economic inequality in Southeast Asia. In Indonesia, Martin Slama was guest researcher at Gadjah Mada University and the State Islamic University Syarif Hidayatullah and currently cooperates with the State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga. He was also a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg.

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