Digital Piety and Maternal Agency: Islamic Parenting Practices Among Urban Muslim Mothers in Indonesia

This study examines how urban Muslim mothers in Indonesia negotiate Islamic motherhood through everyday engagement with digital platforms such as Instagram and Telegram. Drawing on virtual ethnography, it analyzes how maternal piety, religious subjectivity, and religious authority are shaped within algorithmically mediated environments that function as a digital third space alongside domestic and institutional religious settings. The findings show that maternal agency in these spaces is neither fully autonomous nor passive, but continuously negotiated within dense normative contexts that circulate ideals of pious motherhood. In Indonesia’s Muslim-majority digital public, mothers engage in practices such as content curation, selective participation, and visibility management, through which they perform affective, ethical, and pedagogical labor. By foregrounding maternal experience in the Global South, this study contributes to scholarship on digital religion and gender by showing how Islamic parenting operates as a lived, mediated, and relational form of religiosity embedded in everyday practice.