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Knowledge in the making : embodying transdisciplinary moments on organic agriculture in Yogyakarta, Indonesia

  • Organic agriculture in Java, Indonesia, has been historically intertwined with social movements that struggled for more economically, ecologically, culturally, and socially sustainable agriculture. While these grassroots movements emerged under an authoritarian government that showed little interest in organic agriculture, the turn of the 21st century saw the rapid involvement of the Indonesian government in supporting, regulating and, arguably, commodifying organic agriculture. Institutionalization triggered diverse responses from competing organic actors, reflecting their different standpoints and knowledges. In this context, a transdisciplinary approach is deemed suitable to provide context-specific insights into organic agriculture. This dissertation draws on anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to explore the politics of knowledge of organic agriculture in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as a contribution to a critique of transdisciplinarity. My interest on the hierarchization of different knowledges is inspired by theOrganic agriculture in Java, Indonesia, has been historically intertwined with social movements that struggled for more economically, ecologically, culturally, and socially sustainable agriculture. While these grassroots movements emerged under an authoritarian government that showed little interest in organic agriculture, the turn of the 21st century saw the rapid involvement of the Indonesian government in supporting, regulating and, arguably, commodifying organic agriculture. Institutionalization triggered diverse responses from competing organic actors, reflecting their different standpoints and knowledges. In this context, a transdisciplinary approach is deemed suitable to provide context-specific insights into organic agriculture. This dissertation draws on anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) to explore the politics of knowledge of organic agriculture in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as a contribution to a critique of transdisciplinarity. My interest on the hierarchization of different knowledges is inspired by the work of anthropologists of knowledge that asks how the communities they study construct knowledge and how they themselves construct knowledge about these communities. Since transdisciplinary knowledge is co-produced by science and society and reflects their embedded power relations, transdisciplinary research needs to be open to different interpretations, and reflexive towards the unequal distribution of resources, accountability, and responsibility. By linking these two lines of thought, I examine the making of knowledges through reflexive transdisciplinary work. I reflect on how “epistemic living space” (Felt 2009) and “co-presence” (Chua 2015) affect research and shape the politics of knowledge of organic agriculture in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I argue that the hierarchization of different knowledges of organic agriculture was intertwined with my shifting positionalities, as a field researcher in Indonesia and PhD student at Passau University, as I moved between these two different “field sites”. This cumulative dissertation is divided into two parts. In Part I, “Knowledge in the making”, I present my contributions towards transdisciplinary knowledge production and politics of knowledge of organic agriculture. Part II, “Publications”, comprises the three stand-alone papers. The first contribution is my formulation of the notion of knowledge in the making. The second is my exploration of the ways that reflexive transdisciplinary work, and living and intersubjective experience shape knowledge in the making. The third is my demonstration of how an understanding of knowledge in the making sheds lights on the politics of knowledge of organic agriculture. This approach serves to examine the politics involved in synthesizing the conceptualizations of organic agriculture employed by different actors into one overarching narrative, such as sustainable agriculture or alternative agriculture. My final contribution is the notion of transdisciplinary moments, a conceptualization of transdisciplinary research practice that accounts for the politics of knowledge in which both scientific and extra-scientific actors are embedded. As a conclusion, I share the lessons learned from pursuing a PhD as a cumulative dissertation in an unstructured setting within a German–Indonesian research project on Indonesian organic agriculture. Finally, I identify bodies of literature and strands of thinking for future engagement within transdisciplinary research and discuss their potential to contribute to radical change in the institutional and value structures of contemporary academia.show moreshow less

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Metadaten
Author:Dimas Dwi LaksmanaORCiD
URN:urn:nbn:de:bvb:739-opus4-12667
Place of publication:Passau
Advisor:Martina Padmanabhan, Yunita Winarto
Document Type:Doctoral Thesis
Language:English
Year of Completion:2023
Date of Publication (online):2023/06/05
Date of first Publication:2023/06/05
Publishing Institution:Universität Passau
Granting Institution:Universität Passau, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Date of final exam:2023/05/26
Release Date:2023/06/05
Tag:STS; epistemic living space; politics of knowledge
Page Number:154 Seiten
Institutes:Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät
Dewey Decimal Classification:6 Technik, Medizin, angewandte Wissenschaften / 63 Landwirtschaft
3 Sozialwissenschaften / 30 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie / 300 Sozialwissenschaften
open_access (DINI-Set):open_access
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - CC BY - Namensnennung 4.0 International