Governance of the Child in Indonesia: A New Networked Order?

10/06/2009 - 15:30

10 June 2009
15.30 - 17.00 hrs
Leiden, the Netherlands

The Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar by Jan Newberry, Associate Professor, University of Lethbridge

Venue: KITLV, Reuvensplaats 2, 2311 BE, Leiden. Room 138

There has been an explosion of attention to early childhood education (Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini or PAUD) in the Yogyakarta region since 2000. These programs for children from 0-6 years of age straddle the line between middle class desire and non-governmental organizing for democratization. On one hand, these programs seem to suggest the emergence of a new category of person: the empowered child, whose development is managed by an emerging transnational network of expertise on child development. On the other, these programs prompt questions about the possibilities for democratic governance post-Suharto. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Yogyakarta region, this paper considers whether the network of experts, activists, and entrepreneurs involved in early childhood education offers the possibility for democratic reform. This paper also poses an ethnographic answer to the question of the usefulness of neoliberal governmentality as an analytic frame.

Jan Newberry teaches in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Her monograph Back Door Java: State Formation and the Domestic in Working Class Java was published in 2006 (Broadview/University of Toronto). She has also written on women, space, and abstract labour in urban kampung in central Java.

For more information on this seminar please contact Yayah Siegers at kitlv@kitlv.nl or 071-5272295

The Leiden Southeast Asia Seminar is a cooperation of the KITLV, IIAS, VVI and the Departments of Languages and Cultures of Indonesia and of Cultural Anthropology & Development Sociology, Leiden University