Vol. 4 No. 1 (2022): Journal of Asian Social Science Research

Editors’ Preface
JASSR, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2022

It is with great pleasure that we present Journal of Asian Social Science Research (JASSR) Volume 4, Number 1, 2022. The five articles gathered in this issue speak to the intellectual range and public relevance of contemporary social science scholarship, while also sharing a deeper concern with the ways power is imagined, organized, contested, and lived across Asian societies and beyond.

What lends this issue its coherence is not a single theme in the narrow sense, but a common commitment to examining how dominant orders sustain themselves and how they may be questioned. Across debates on technology, education, law, religion, social movements, and democracy, the contributions assembled here show that institutions and ideas acquire meaning only in relation to history, culture, and lived experience. In this respect, the issue offers not simply a set of case studies, but a broader invitation to think more carefully about how social worlds are shaped by both visible structures and quieter forms of exclusion and control.

The opening article sets a reflective and intellectually ambitious tone by challenging several persistent centrisms in social media research, including technocentrism, online data centrism, moment centrism, novelty centrism, and success centrism. Its call for greater historical depth, interdisciplinarity, and analytical complexity is especially significant because it reminds us that social inquiry must resist easy fascination with the new when that fascination obscures the longer trajectories and deeper social relations that give technology its meaning. In many ways, this methodological intervention resonates throughout the issue, since each of the articles that follow also asks us to look beneath surface appearances and attend to the structures that shape public life.

This concern with what lies beneath official rhetoric is especially visible in the article on school leadership in multicultural Indonesia. While school leaders may express commitment to diversity and moral leadership, the study shows that practices within schools can still reproduce domination through covertly discriminatory policies and the strategic use of cultural and religious identities. Read alongside the socio-legal inquiry into adat courts, the article underscores a larger point that formal recognition alone is never sufficient. Whether in schools or in legal systems, the challenge is not only to acknowledge plurality, but to protect it in ways that are substantively just and socially meaningful.

Questions of historical agency and collective resistance are taken up in the study of Muslim social movements in Cirebon in the early twentieth century. By recovering the role of organizations such as Sarekat Islam, Persarekatan Ulama, Nahdlatul Ulama, and Muhammadiyah in shaping new forms of anti-colonial resistance, the article adds important texture to our understanding of how religious and social mobilization contributed to the emergence of broader nationalist consciousness. Here again, the issue asks readers to see history not as a fixed backdrop, but as a dynamic field in which communities interpret changing conditions and devise new strategies of action.

The issue closes with a sobering reflection on the condition of democracy in contemporary India. By examining growing intolerance, attacks on minorities, the narrowing of civic and media space, and the pressure of majoritarian politics under the Modi era, the article raises questions that reach far beyond one national context. It reminds us that democracy cannot be measured by electoral procedure alone, because its vitality also depends on pluralism, protection of rights, and the preservation of spaces in which disagreement and difference can endure without fear.

Taken together, the articles in this issue offer a rich and thoughtful portrait of societies negotiating authority, diversity, memory, and justice under changing conditions. They move across different subjects and scales of analysis, yet converge in showing that social research is at its strongest when it is historically attentive, conceptually alert, and ethically responsive to the worlds it seeks to understand.

As editors, we are grateful for the care, seriousness, and range of the scholarship represented in these pages. We hope this issue will be read not only as a contribution to ongoing academic conversation, but also as an invitation to reflect more deeply on the fragile, contested, and profoundly human character of social life. We extend our sincere thanks to the authors for their thoughtful work, to the reviewers for their generosity and discernment, and to our readers for sustaining this journal as a shared space of inquiry, reflection, and dialogue.

Best regards,
Asep Iqbal