UH Mānoa Students Participate in a Three-Week Cross-Cultural Field School in Indonesia

The Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa is proud to highlight the recent participation of thirteen UH Mānoa students in a three-week field school program in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. This unique program, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, is part of an initiative to train the next generation of Southeast Asia scholars focusing on the fields of political ecology, agrarian studies, and rural transformations.

In partnership with the Forest and Society Research Group at Universitas Hasanuddin (Indonesia), students explored how political, environmental, and social transformations are reshaping every rural livelihoods.We began the first week at UNHAS Hutan Pendidikan, followed by two weeks of fieldwork in the Gowa district, living and working alongside communities in highland areas up to 1,500 m above sea level. Together, we explored how political, environmental, and social transformations are reshaping everyday rural livelihoods.

They have four different groups working on a wide range of interesting topics from community-based water and land governance (tanah gilirang), rice seed-saving and local ecological knowledge networks, commodities and village transformation through studying tomatoes, and Indigenous resilience through water claims. But at the heart of field school is methodological training, and this year we used various methods as well as tried new ones: from ethnography, field observation, workdays, “jalan-jalan”, “pesta as methods”, then to photo-voice, oral history, village history, seasonal calendars, and different visual and mapping methods such as participatory mapping, drone scoping, water sketch mapping, and land tenure mapping.

We are proud of the students’ achievements and the collaborative efforts between UH Mānoa and our Southeast Asian partners.