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Paper short abstract

Employing an ethnographic approach, this study argues that educational mobility enables students from eastern Indonesia to advocate issues of home villages in academic settings. Academic settings thus become sites of narrative contestation, reflecting a politics of belonging to the nation.

Paper long abstract

Higher education in Indonesia is highly unequal and concentrated in the region of Java. This concentration continuously shapes patterns of educational mobility from across the country to Java, particularly from the so-called periphery of eastern Indonesia, including East Nusa Tenggara, North Maluku, Maluku, and Papua. This study argues that educational mobility has functioned as a medium through which students from eastern Indonesia voice, narrate, and advocate for issues occurring in their home villages within academic settings. Employing a seven-month ethnographic approach conducted from July 2025 to January 2026 among students from eastern Indonesia in Yogyakarta, this study reveals both the opportunities and challenges these students face in contributing to academic narratives of the nation from the perspectives of eastern Indonesia.

In this sense, the academic setting has become a site of narrative contestation concerning how students narrate Indonesia as a nation from their perspectives. Such contestation includes not only negotiation but also advocacy about their home villages as parts of the nation, especially how students from eastern Indonesia gain opportunities to articulate their perspectives, how teaching staff encourage and support them, and how their fellow friends pay attention to these perspectives. This narrative contestation represents the politics of belonging, which shapes the extent to which students from eastern Indonesia experience a sense of belonging to the Indonesian nation.