Myra Mentari Mentari Abubakar

This project, led by Myra Mentari Abubakar, a research affiliate at the International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS), works with women’s communities, educators, and cultural workers in Aceh, Indonesia, to co-map overlooked narratives of female historical figures and everyday heroines. While Indonesian nationalism celebrates a handful of elite women like Cut Nyak Din, Kartini, Malahayati, many others remain unacknowledged in local and national memory. Building on long-standing relationships with the International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS) and local heritage actors, the project will document grassroots memory practices, including oral histories, local monuments, school storytelling, and informal rituals, and work with community members to visualise these through a participatory mapping platform, namely HeroMap.ID. The research will be co-designed with women in Aceh who have lived through post-conflict reconstruction and are active in heritage, education, or intergenerational knowledge transfer. The project combines anthropological fieldwork with community-led workshops, ensuring shared authorship, capacity-building, and public-facing outputs in Acehnese and Bahasa Indonesia. This engaged collaboration contributes to broader conversations about gender, marginalisation, and the politics of memory in postcolonial contexts.