Conference to promote Indonesian culture

UCLA’s newly established Indonesian Studies Program will host the “First UCLA Indonesian Studies Graduate Student Conference,” a two-day conference beginning today, which will educate people about a wide variety of Indonesian academics and culture.

The conference aims to unite individuals from various disciplines to reexamine aspects of Indonesian culture as well as investigate possibilities for future research in the field.

Through this conference, organizers said that they hope UCLA students will help promote Indonesian Studies and attract students from various fields to the program.

“We realize it is very important to garner interest in the program because after the recent budget cuts, language classes, particularly Indonesian and Thai, are facing being wiped off the course list,” said Kimberly Twarog, assistant organizer of the conference and a third-year women’s studies student.

“Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, has one of the most widely spoken native languages in the world and yet is very much under-studied in the United States,” said Gustav Brown, assistant organizer of the conference.

“It’s an enormously diverse place, and it’s changing rapidly in many areas in terms of community, identity as well as undergoing social and political change,” said the third-year sociology graduate student.

“Community, Identity, Change” is the theme of the conference, which will cover the broad range of topics in Indonesian Studies and culture.

Panels will be led by various distinguished faculty and graduate students in Indonesian Studies across different universities, Brown said.

There are some broad panels such as “Crafting and Contesting Identities,” which range from topics of ethnic identity and stereotyping to the role of performing arts, and some more focused panels such as “Perspectives on Islam,” which will explain the dynamics of Indonesia as the third-largest majority Muslim state, he said.

“It’s not just talk and lecture-type presentations,” Twarog said.

“There are also aspects of photography, dance, film (to) be presented,” she said.

Bridging both academic and cultural aspects, the conference will foster many real-world applications and go beyond thinking about Indonesia, Brown said.

Free and open to the public, the conference is funded and sponsored by UCLA Indonesian Studies, a branch of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. The program itself was funded and established in 2008 by Robert Lemelson, a research anthropologist at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience at UCLA and lecturer in the departments of anthropology and psychology.

Having worked for over 15 years in Indonesia, Lemelson said that he helped establish the center because he believes that UCLA can become a great leader in Indonesian Studies.

Also a research and documentary filmmaker, Lemelson will do a film screening and discussion of his work “40 Years of Silence: an Indonesian Tragedy” at the conference.

The documentary film exposes a part of Indonesian history in which one of the largest mass-killings took place due to former President Suharto’s authoritarian rule and the purge of “communists” within the country, he said.

Lemelson said that he hopes the conference will garner more support for Indonesian Studies in UCLA and in the greater surrounding communities.

“There are great intellectual and institutional resources at UCLA, and it is my hope that we can help create a new generation of scholars who will provide key insights into Indonesia and Indonesia/U.S. relations,” he said.

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