Description:

EDGS Graduate Lecture Series on Political Ecology

Arryman Scholar and Sociology PhD Student Perdana Roswaldy

This project examines the limitations of undoing gender in a community that has been exacerbated by environmental shocks and changes. The author asks whether and how environmental shocks and the rearrangement of the ecosystem alter the gender structure and performance. She argues that environmental shocks readjust the community’s awareness of gender inequality, to reconfigure, subconsciously or not, their gender prescription to a certain degree. It operates not out of a vacuum and not solely because of the changed ecosystem, but through women’s undervalued labor central to the productive and reproductive economics that involves the environment.

Roswaldy's research took place in the indigenous Batak Toba villages of Pandumaan-Sipituhuta in North Sumatra, Indonesia. The people there recently won their customary right from a corporation that landgrabbed their forest and, consequently, destroyed their livelihoods. She obtained the data through ethnography, interviews, and labor time records to triangulate them with soil quality testing.

Keywords: gender, environment, labor, ethnography