Siti Maimunah

Host Institute

Topic

Reclaiming the Frontier: The differences Adat, Gender and Intersectionality Make for Resource Frontier in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Supervisors

Martina Padmanbhan

Secondment 1

University of Brighton

Mentor

Rebecca Elmhirst

Secondment 2

Centre for International Forestry Research

Mentor

Iliana Monterroso

Fieldwork

Indonesia

Siti Maimunah was born in Jember, East Java. She took Soil-Agriculture as her core study in Jember University and joined the environment group that brought attention to natural resources issues. Her early career began in the year 2000 with JATAM (Mining Advocacy Network) where she has developed her knowledged about women and mining issues. Later, she became a researcher of Sajogyo Institute, focusing on Agrarian issues. She contributed to writing both articles and opinion in the national newspapers as well as online websites. To this end, she has written the following: “Indigenous People and State of Mining” (2010); Mollo, Development and Climate Change (2015); Weaving and The Guardian of Identity (2018). She completed her masters degree on politics from University of Indonesia (2016).

Objectives of the research

Mining is an exceptionally masculinised industry in terms of the composition of its workforce, its cultures of production and its symbolic despoliation of a feminised nature. The ESR will look at the intersection of socioecological transformation with the transformation of ethnic and gender identities in the IndoMet project in Kalimantan, Indonesia. The ESR will examine how mining affects the process of identity formation, reproduction and instrumentalisation in the context of a masculinised mining industry. Using a FPE lens, the ESR will look at peoples’ relation to the natural world and their relation to each other in the organisation of daily life of local communities through which meanings of ethnicity and gender are constituted. It will explore how ethnicity disrupts or reinforces the existing gender order and how changes in gender roles relate to ethnic change in the course of mining activities.

Expected Results

The ESR will explore how ethnicity and gender is used by villagers as self-identification, a political tool and a commercial asset in struggles on mining activities looking at individual and group identities as organisation of daily life of the local communities.

Progress update

Siti finished her 1st fieldwork and she is currently writing her preliminary findings. Siti submitted her first paper for Asien, the German Journal of Contemporary Asia, in September 2020, and she is waiting for the reviewers’ comments. She is currently on the process of analyzing her data and conducting the literature review for her second and third papers.