Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Michelle Ann Miller, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The Programme Nasional Pemberdayaan Masyarakat (PNPM) Mandiri Perkotaaan (National Community Empowerment Program-Urban) is a development initiative that aims to alleviate urban poverty, enhance community participation and improve local governance. The state has facilitated the establishment and capacity building of local bodies comprised of elected representatives / volunteers who implement state-funded local initiatives. These bodies are characteristic of ‘straddlers’: organisations that span the state-society divide (Read 2009). As such, volunteers sit across diverse and often conflicting moral frameworks, including the neoliberal ethos of the state, notions of fairness inscribed by feelings of jealousy, discourses of anti-corruption, democratic values, and religious beliefs among others.

This paper offers a preliminary reading of volunteer narratives of the PNPM programme in Medan to consider the ways they negotiate this moral terrain. I do so through two vantage points. First, I consider the creative possibilities for self that arise from reconciling ethical dilemmas and moral anxieties. Taking Foucault’s work on self-cultivation as my starting point, I examine how volunteer’s participation is tied to efforts of self-improvement and ethical enactments. The second vantage point reframes ‘community’ development as a site of ‘moral experience’ (Zigon and Throop 2014). Practices and interactions associated with the program are reconsidered through the discursive and embodied moralities they engender. Through these two vantage points, I aim to reveal the possibilities for re-imaginings of self and self-other relations through the PNPM, as well as hint at contemporary forms of sociality in urban Indonesia.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Tanya Jakimow is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Fellow in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales (UNSW Australia). After obtaining her PhD in Development Studies from the University of Melbourne, she was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow in the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) Australia. She has since contributed to interdisciplinary research projects examining agrarian change in the context of climate variability. Tanya has published journal articles on topics such as livelihoods, agrarian change, and non-government organisations. Her recent manuscript, Interpreting Change in Agrarian Societies: A Case for Decentring Development and Centring the “Self-in-process” is to be published under the Anthropology, Change and Development Series by Palgrave MacMillan. Her current research project shifts attention to urban localities in India and Indonesia, examining how new forms of decentralised governance and state-led development influence “processes-of-self”.

REGISTRATION

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