Seminar by Farwiza Farhan & Matthew Minarchek | ‘Past and present of nature protection in Sumatra: People, spaces, species’

Farwiza’s research explores the political economy of natural resource management in Aceh (northern Sumatra, Indonesia), with particular focus on the contestations about, access to and control over the globally renowned Leuser Ecosystem. Through this research, she seeks to understand how policies surrounding natural resources exploitation and conservation are created and implemented and how stakeholders with different interests interact with and influence each other.

Matthew studies the sociocultural and environmental history of the Leuser region from 1890-1950. He situates a place-based history of Leuser within the context of an emerging international nature protection movement. He examines how land, forests, and species were known in Leuser and the ways in which expertise was produced, disseminated, experienced, and contested.

Farwiza Farhan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. She holds a BSc. in Marine Biology from the University Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia (2007) and an MA in Environmental Management from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (2010). In addition to her academic research, Farwiza works with a small local NGO in Aceh, Indonesia, which focuses on the protection, conservation and restoration of the Leuser Ecosystem through advocacy for policy improvement. She is currently based at the University of Amsterdam.

Matthew Minarchek is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He received a BA in Sciences and Conservation Studies from the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico (2005) and an MA in International Affairs/Southeast Asian Studies from Ohio University (2009). Matthew has more than two years of experience living and conducting archival and ethnographic research in Indonesia. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies while he completes his dissertation research in the colonial archives in the Netherlands.

Please register if you wish to attend this seminar: [email protected].