Yanti Sastrawan, PhD Candidate in Media & Communications at Södertörn University Photo: Unknown

With almost 280 million people, Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation, encompassing more than 1,300 ethnic groups and over 700 regional languages. Amid this diversity, the state promotes Pancasila, the Five Principles, as the official ideological foundation of the nation (Frederick et al., 1993). While Pancasila is constitutionally enshrined and widely invoked as a unifying framework, its meanings have been historically contested. Throughout Indonesia’s educational system development, it has been persistent with its ambition to educate citizenship rooted in the Pancasila ideology. One of its advances is the launch of the ‘Merdeka Mengajar’ (‘Emancipated Teaching’) the Minister of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology in 2022.

Arguably, these digital media initiatives not only bring optimism through technological solutionism (Facer & Selwyn, 2021; van Dijck et al., 2018) but also consequential risks that constantly reshape teaching practices (Rahm, 2019). In observing the meaning-making of Pancasila through digitalisation of education, one ought to start from how a national ideology is defined and interpreted. This study is based on the findings from an interview with a representative from the Pancasila Ideology Development Agency (BPIP), as well as a selection of documents and webpages analyses from President Soekarno’s speech on the Birth of Pancasila to BPIP policy documents scrutinising the materialisation of the ideology. From this analysis, the ideals of the imaginary education based on the imagined community (Anderson, 2006) can show that the institutionalisation of an ideology concretises a top-down approach of measuring Pancasila into right-and-wrong principles rather than a life philosophy.

Keywords: platformisation of education, Platform Merdeka Mengajar, state ideology, citizenship education, nationalism, identity.

Yanti Sastrawan is a PhD Candidate in Media & Communications at Södertörn University. Her research project examines the digitalisation of education in Indonesia in the context of the state ideology known as Pancasila, or the Five Principles, and how it is being implemented in citizenship education. In October 2025 she is a visiting PhD Candidate at Stockholm Center for Global Asia within the Graduate School in Asian Studies.

TIME:  Wednesday 15 October, 2025, 14.00-15.30

VENUE: C312, Stockholm Center for Global Asia, Stockholm University

Please register at latest by 14 October, 2025. 

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