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Ana Nurhasanah Surjanto, Monash University, AustraliaAbstract
This article explores the emotional negotiations experienced by Indonesian Muslim women pursuing doctoral programs (PhD) as they transition from Indonesia to Australia. It highlights how these scholars navigate grief, homesickness, and identity tensions throughout their transnational educational journeys within Australian higher education. Grounded in feminist sociology, the study employs Institutional Ethnography (IE) as both a methodological and an analytical approach, complemented by an intersectional feminist framework of Islamic and transnational perspectives. IE begins from the standpoint of women’s everyday experiences, examining how institutional policies and texts shape their academic and emotional lives. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with Indonesian Muslim women PhD students from diverse faculties in Australia and were analysed critically. As an insider, I engaged with participants as a researcher, community leader and ethnographer, which enabled me to gain deeper insight into their lived realities. The findings reveal that institutional mechanisms such as doctoral milestones, progress reports, and counselling protocols profoundly influence students’ emotional well-being. These women constantly balance the intellectual rigours of research with the invisible emotional work of sustaining belonging, identity, and faith within a culturally unfamiliar system. Framing emotional labour as both survival and resistance, this study demonstrates how Indonesian Muslim women scholars enact agency and resilience within Western academia, which often marginalises their experiences. Ultimately, the research contributes to reimagining international doctoral education by consolidating the strength, complexity, and lived realities of Muslim women navigating global academic spaces.
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Conference: WCSS2026Stream: Ethnicity
This paper is part of the WCSS2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Surjanto A. (2026) Quiet Tears, Strong Minds: Emotional Negotiation of Indonesian Muslim Women Navigating Transnational Life in Australian Higher Education ISSN: 2760-7267 The Washington DC Conference on the Social Sciences 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 29-42) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2760-7267.2026.3
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2760-7267.2026.3
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