About

Rachel Rinaldo is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder with a research focus on cultural sociology, globalization, gender, culture, and social change. She completed her education at the University of Chicago in the Department of Sociology. Rinaldo's scholarship centers on the intersections of Islam, feminism, and social movements, particularly in Indonesia. Her first book, "Mobilizing Piety: Islam and Feminism in Indonesia" (Oxford 2013), is an ethnographic study of women activists in Jakarta, exploring how Muslim and secular women engage in activism within the context of Indonesian society. Her research extends to contemporary issues such as marriage and divorce in urbanizing Indonesia, where she examines the role of socioeconomic differences in shaping divorce experiences among Muslim couples, and the impact of globalization on art scenes in Southeast Asia. Through her ethnographic work, Rinaldo investigates how gendered religious scripts and cultural norms influence family dynamics, gender identities, and social change in Muslim contexts. Her work also addresses broader themes of women's agency, the politics of morality, and the negotiation of gender roles within religious and cultural frameworks, contributing to a nuanced understanding of gender and globalization in postcolonial societies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Psychoanalysis
• Social psychology
• Law
• Gender studies
• Geography
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Demography
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels

  The AAG Review of Books · 2026-03-18

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• “If I die, just pray for me”: Low-income working women, precarity, and the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia

  Critical Sociology · 2026-05-02

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  How did women in the Global South manage work and family responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what can we learn from their experiences about how precarity intersects with gender inequality and crises? This article investigates low-income Indonesian women’s narratives of how they navigated work and family responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, examining how they turned to religious faith for support; increased their income earning; and undertook pivots to new economic initiatives. Women’s income-earning made their families more secure, but they remained primarily responsible for the domestic work in their households. A weak social safety net, work precarity, and gender inequalities intersect in ways that compel low-income women in Indonesia to engage in both paid work and unpaid caregiving. While women are increasingly important as income earners in Indonesia and globally, in the absence of societal support for care, their income-earning does not necessarily challenge gender inequalities.

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• “I Have a Right to A Better <i>Imam</i> ”: Divorce, Islam, and Changing Marriage Ideals in Indonesia

  Critical Asian Studies · 2025-11-06

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• Amplifying inequalities: Gendered perceptions of work flexibility and the division of household labor during the COVID‐19 pandemic

  Gender Work and Organization · 2023-06-02 · 15 citations

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  Abstract During the COVID‐19 pandemic in the US, mothers have taken on more of the responsibility for childcare (including remote schooling) and housework. How did dual‐income couples negotiate domestic labor during the pandemic in ways that ended up with women taking on a larger role? Based on in‐depth interviews with 33 parents, we found that men's jobs were often discussed as being more demanding, particularly in their need for protected time, or requiring rigid time commitments, while women's work was considered more flexible and able to accommodate childcare needs. We argue that gendered perceptions about the flexibility of paid work shaped couple's negotiations over the division of labor. While many interviewees considered men's jobs as “simply more demanding,” we propose that this is a gendered perception that reflects entrenched cultural norms that associate masculinity with paid work and thus men's paid work is prioritized in many families.

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• Divorce Narratives and Class Inequalities in Indonesia

  Journal of Family Issues · 2023 · 20 citations

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  In the past 20 years, divorce has increased in Indonesia. Indonesian statistics show that divorces initiated by women exceed those by men. One issue that is often neglected is how socioeconomic differences also play a role in this matter. Drawing on our collaborative research on Muslim divorces in Indonesia, this paper focuses on the interplay between divorce strategies and socioeconomic differences among Muslim couples. Our in-depth interviews with 93 Muslim men and women and 19 judges from Islamic courts show that class differences shape distinctive dynamics of divorce among Muslim Indonesians. Couples from less educated, lower-income backgrounds accept marriage dissolution more easily, with women becoming much less tolerant of men’s behaviors such as infliction of domestic violence, infidelity, and failure to provide financial support. Educated, middle-class urban couples divorce for similar reasons but tend to experience a lengthier process accompanied by complex layers of conflict. Many educated women’s narratives emphasize their ability to support themselves through working, and a desire to be free of a bad marriage at any cost. Class and education thus contribute to significant differences in the experience and trajectories of divorce in Indonesia.

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• Entangled Pieties: Muslim–Christian Relations and Gendered Sociality in Java, Indonesia , by En-Chieh Chao

  Innovation in the Social Sciences · 2023-06-29

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• Indonesians and Their Arab World: Guided Mobility among Labor Migrants and Mecca Pilgrims

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2022-05-01 · 3 citations

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• Spirituality and Islam

  2021-12-21 · 1 citations

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  Abstract Many Muslim societies have long histories of mystical, devotional, and esoteric traditions such as Sufism, which are today commonly referred to as “spiritual” traditions. Yet spirituality within Islamic traditions has an uncertain and marginalized status in many contemporary Muslim societies as a result of local, national, and global political struggles over Islam. In Indonesia, where Sufism has had a major historical influence for much of the twentieth century, there has been a strong trend toward scripturalist Islamic modernism. Yet along with Indonesia’s Islamic revival since the 1990s has come a revival of Sufism, particularly among the urban upper middle class. This chapter explores the Sufist revival as a manifestation of spirituality in Indonesia, examining the recent history of Sufism and the evolving relationship between Sufism and other ways of being Muslim, as well as surveying recent scholarship on the social and political contours of the embrace of Sufism by educated urbanites.

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• Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia by Nancy Smith-Hefner

  Anthropological Quarterly · 2020-01-01

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  Reviewed by: Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia by Nancy Smith-Hefner Rachel Rinaldo Nancy Smith-Hefner, Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019. 262 pp. Nancy Smith-Hefner, Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019. 262 pp. The past two decades have brought immense political, social, and cultural changes to Indonesia. Democratization, an Islamic revival, integration into global and regional political institutions, the rise of social media and information technologies, a boom in higher education, continuing high rates of urbanization, and economic growth (and contraction in some sectors)—all of these have transformed the world's fourth largest country at a dizzying rate since the 1990s. Observing that many of the scholarly discussions of Islam and modernity focus on the realm of states and legal institutions, Nancy Smith-Hefner proposes that "For most youth…the debates over Islam and modernity are felt most compellingly with regard to questions of more immediate, quotidian, and intimate provenance, including those of courtship and marriage, relations with one's parents and kin, career and family, and most generally, everyday interactions and patterns of sociality" (18). In her richly detailed new book, Smith-Hefner chronicles how the Islamic revival and other large-scale social changes have reshaped gender, family, and sexuality among young urban Muslims in this Muslim majority country. One of the foremost anthropologists of Indonesia, Smith-Hefner began doing ethnographic fieldwork to explore these issues in the vibrant city of Yogyakarta, Central Java, in 1999, and she continued to return for fieldwork visits over the next 16 years. This gives Islamizing Intimacies: Youth, Sexuality, and Gender in Contemporary Indonesia a unique [End Page 255] longitudinal perspective. Smith-Hefner also draws on her experience studying Indonesia and her wealth of knowledge about Indonesian history to provide critical historical context for her findings. Smith-Hefner is especially interested in educated youth on Java, Indonesia's most populated island. This demographic has been at the forefront of Indonesia's Islamic resurgence. Thus, many of her interviewees are university students and recent graduates, from both Islamic universities as well as secular universities. She carefully explores the family backgrounds and religious worldviews of students in Yogyakarta, showing how the young generation as a whole practices Islam in a very different and more overtly pietistic way compared to their parents and grandparents, and how even among these increasingly pious young people there is an immense diversity of Islamic orientations and outlooks. One of the strengths of Smith-Hefner's analysis is that she is attentive to the fact that while Islam is a very significant influence in these young people's lives, it is not the only one. Another is her emphasis on diversity and pluralism among Muslims, which highlights the heterogeneity of both the religion and Indonesia itself. As she writes, "in their everyday practice, the vast majority of youth express other, often contradictory, concerns and seem responsive to not one but a variety of moral registers" (41). Chapter 1 introduces the book, providing an overview of its main themes and a thoughtful discussion of methods, particularly the use of in-depth interviews. Chapter 2 contextualizes Indonesian youth culture in Indonesia's broader history, and particularly among 20th century religious and political transformations, while Chapter 3 sketches out the different religious and political orientations of contemporary Indonesian youth, including some of the primary organizations and institutions with which many youth are involved. In Chapter 4, Smith-Hefner examines Indonesian "gender currents" (70), defined as the "socially sustained normative frame for understanding and enacting" gendered aspects of social life. Here, she explores the sex and gender ideologies that operate in contemporary Indonesia, with particular emphasis on the influences of Islam, Javanese culture, and the state. At the heart of Islamizing Intimacies is Smith-Hefner's meticulous description of shifts in gender, sexuality, and romance (Chapters 5–7). Importantly, while there has been much concern that the Islamic resurgence in Indonesia represents a "retraditionalization" or "redomestication" of women, she shows how young urban Muslim women are [End Page 256] simultaneously more devout but also more interested in pursuing...

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• Contentious belonging: The place of minorities in Indonesia, by Greg Fealy and Ronit Ricci (eds.)

  Asian journal of social science · 2020-05-08

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Frequent coauthors

• Kirin Narayan

  Australian National University

  49 shared

• Ann Mullen

  California University of Pennsylvania

  49 shared

• Pei-Chia Lan

  Pomona College

  49 shared

• Jin-Kyung Park

  Chungbuk National University

  49 shared

• J.K. Misra

  University of Pittsburgh

  49 shared

• Rachel Silvey

  49 shared

• Kyeong-Hee Choi

  University of Chicago

  49 shared

• Namhee Lee

  49 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of Chicago

  2007

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Scholar in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2022-2023)