Description:

Join the Roberta Buffett Institute for a discussion on Asian scholarship with Inaya Rakhmani, Director of Academics of the Asia Research Centre at the University of Indonesia (ARC-UI), and Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih, Deputy Director of Academics at ARC-UI. Additional talk details are forthcoming. Lunch will be served at 12:15 p.m.

This talk unpacks the conditions of knowledge production in and from contemporary universities. Drawing on the experience of producing knowledge from within Asia, this talk centers Indonesia and Asian Studies not simply as a place or academic field, but as a lens for understanding how older ways of thinking, Cold War–era frameworks, and today’s pressures on universities come together and often clash. This discussion will suggest that Indonesia and Asia matter not because they are unique, but because they bring these tensions into sharp focus, helping us see a larger problem: academic disciplines shaped by a past geopolitical moment struggling to keep pace with a rapidly changing world.

Both speakers are based in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation and a democracy enmeshed with authoritarian legacies, home to a robust civil society continually challenging predatorial encroachment over its land and people in an increasingly extractive economy. For scholars of religion, democracy, technology, climate change, or political economy, Indonesia poses questions that unsettle the assumptions embedded in how these fields have been constituted.

About the speakers

Inaya Rakhmani is a visiting scholar in residence hosted by Laura Hein, Director of the Arryman Scholars Program within the Roberta Buffett Institute’s Equality Development & Globalization Studies Program (EDGS). Rakhmani is the Director of Academics of the Asia Research Centre at the University of Indonesia (ARC-UI). She uses cultural political economy to study media and communications as well as knowledge and information to explain broader capitalist changes. She researches the role of social and mass media in hindering democratic developments in Indonesia, with comparisons to India, Egypt, and Turkey from 2015 to the present day.

Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih is a visiting scholar in residence, also hosted by Laura Hein. Widya Permata Yasih is the Deputy Director of Academics of the Asia Research Centre at the University of Indonesia (ARC-UI). Her doctoral research investigates the expansion of precarious work arrangements tied to the gig economy and its effects on workers’ subjective experience, identity formation, and organizing propensity in Indonesia. She is also a faculty member at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Universitas Indonesia.

Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated.