This research explores symbolic action and the intergenerational imagination in transformative social movements in Indonesia. Two community-based schools located in Central Java, Indonesia—Sanggar Anak Alam (SALAM, the Nature Childrens’ Studio) and Komunitas Belajar Qaryah Thayyibah (KBQT, the Learning Community for Village Empowerment)—form the grounds for this study. Scholarship on social movements in Indonesia often views cultural resistance as determined by large-scale acts of protest through the actions of high-profile figures in predominantly urban sites. In the context of 20th century activism against the authoritarianism of the New Order state (1965-1998), the strength of cultural hegemony of the time made it so that these kinds of movements were easily suppressed due to their public staging and internal fragmentation. In this project, I explore movements that are not often represented in scholarship. The community schools of SALAM and KBQT also began as counter-movements to the New Order hegemony but grew out of small-scale negotiations among a diverse set of actors at the interface between rural and urban experience in Java. As they continue to organize today, what actions contributes to the sustained movements of these communities? How do they effect transformative change? I investigate these questions through creative productions by members of SALAM and KBQT: works of literature and performance arts gathered from fieldwork conducted in Indonesia in 2015, combined with oral histories, as well as my own participation within these schools. This dissertation makes several contributions to existing social movement scholarship in Indonesia. First, it demonstrates how change takes place over long periods of time, through processual steps constituted by intergenerational communities. Second, the efficacy of transformative social movement action is shown to be contingent upon participation by a multiplicity of decentralized actors. Third, as action itself is distributed more widely, cultural resistance is transformed into cultural resilience through symbolic actions. This work reflects the ways in which the community schools of SALAM and KBQT sustain movements of transformation. By drawing from the ways in which they situate symbolic actions within intergenerational communities at the rural-urban interface in Java, this research shows how new imaginations of transformative change are constituted in scholarship and in Indonesian social movements.