Citizenship laboratory as a space of becoming otherwise: cultivating affective citizenship through critical feminist pedagogy

This article examines how young people develop affective citizenship through participation in a feminist leadership school. Set amid authoritarian populism and democratic regression in Indonesia, the school challenges state-sanctioned regimes of citizenship that tend to reproduce depoliticised ideals of civic participation. Drawing on ethnographic research, the article illustrates how critical feminist pedagogy, informed by diverse feminist traditions and praxis, fosters political subjectivities through affective, relational, and embodied processes of becoming citizens otherwise. Conceptualising the school as a ‘citizenship laboratory’, the article shows how participants experiment with new ways of knowing, relating, and acting politically. The article argues that affective citizenship is an ongoing process of political becoming, cultivated by transforming feeling, desire, and social relations into capacities for collective action. By emphasising feminist pedagogy as a mode of emancipatory and liberatory political formation outside formal institutions, the article contributes to debates on affective citizenship, alternative education, youth activism, and feminist movements in Indonesia and beyond.