Cluster Theme: Nature, Memory, and Belonging
This cluster explores how experiences and encounters with colonialism have altered the natural world
in diverse locations and communities across the world. With particular focus on environmental change and
health crises in Southeast Asia (such as the rise in the region’s petroleum industry, destructive plantation
crops like palm and palm oil production, and infectious disease), these courses seek to provide students
with frameworks and methods for understanding our global climate crisis as one intrinsically linked to past
and present imperialism over land, labor, and resources. The courses in this series engage with theories and
source materials that prioritize local and indigenous voices in representing the past and in articulating
ongoing resistance efforts to respond to social, health, and environmental issues. Chaterji’s work on the
histories of performance and arts resistance in the Indian Ocean world and Romadhon’s research on the
global promotion of Euro-American biomedical perspectives, as well as their shared interest in Southeast
Asian studies, will complement each other in advancing this cluster’s collaborative and interdisciplinary
focus on the intersections of nature, culture, memory, belonging, and the possibilities for resilience when
faced with ongoing environmental change. Given the cross-disciplinary investment at the University of
Washington in issues pertaining to Southeast Asia, this course series will connect undergraduates with
research and initiatives emerging from graduate students and faculty, as well as encourage students to
pursue their own interests in other world regions from a perspective of comparative colonialisms.
Description of Proposed Courses
Winter 2023
Histories of Climate Disaster: Indian Ocean Perspectives (Chaterji)
From experiencing the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa that lowered global temperatures to the 2004
Indian Ocean tsunami that devastated the region’s littoral communities, inhabitants of the Indian Ocean
world are deeply familiar with the intertwined relationship between human societies and the waters that
connect us. In this course, we approach this oceanscape through world history pedagogical methods to
consider how actions taken by various actors have permanently altered the interconnected world in which
we live. Examining the impact of colonialism on the livelihoods of local communities and their landscapes,
this course considers how alterations to the environment – namely agricultural development and resource
extraction – continue to produce economic and health disparities in postcolonial imaginations of the nation
and regional identity. Students will study examples including, but not limited to, the widespread burning of
palm plantations across Southeast Asia that produces the recurring annual “smoke season,” water scarcity
along southeastern Africa’s Swahili coast due to deforestation, and oil extraction in the Persian Gulf and
ongoing imperialist efforts to control resources. Together, we will engage with novels and films to discuss
how ideas of power, race, and violence circulate in memories about climate disaster and environmental
crises across the Indian Ocean world, paying close attention to feminist and Islamic discourses on
environmental change in the region. Students will read Indonesian author and activist Ayu Utami, South
African author and journalist Fred Khumalo, and others to examine how literature provides an avenue for
individual expression and resistance in the face of ongoing climate disaster.
Heal the World: Human, Nature and Culture (Romadhon)
This course concerns everyday ethical relations and negotiations between humans and the natural
environment and landscape that shape the current age of the Anthropocene. The main purpose of this course
is to help students follow everlasting debates on the various ways we imagine nature, landscape, and place,
rethink the roles that we claim from such imaginations, and further, examine the political interplay of
knowledge production and colonial representation behind our imagination of house, city, nation, and
surrounding environments. During the course, students will be introduced to scholarly debates from anthropologists, historians, geographers, and environmentalists to understand how we imagine and later
convert nature into property, explore various ways of human cultural interactions with nature, examine the
roles of colonialism and nationalism in shaping our interactions with nature, and engage with critical
perspectives to question the political meanings and implications of infrastructures, borders, cities, and
natural resources. Students will also be introduced to photovoice methods and will participate in a
photovoice exhibition project under the theme of Heal the World.
Spring 2023
The Art of Resistance: Southeast Asian Responses to Climate Change (Chaterji)
In 2015, Indonesian physical theater company Teater Payung Hitam concluded their artist residency
at the UW with a performance of “Merah Bolong,” a story of Indonesia’s population growth and urban
overcrowding at a time of political and legal uncertainty. Jakarta (Payung Hitam’s homebase) is one of the
many coastal cities around the world at heightened risk of sinking due to rising sea levels, further
compounded by the effects of groundwater extraction. Groups like Payung Hitam produce meaningful
opportunities to respond to the pressing threats of the environmental crisis and to seek accountability from
governments and corporations whose policies have failed to protect those most vulnerable. In this course,
we examine the range of possibilities generated by performing artists in Southeast Asia, like the works of
Payung Hitam, in response to the increasing threats of climate change. Drawing from traditional, Islamic,
and modern performance traditions, we consider how the arts function as a tool for activism and change as
well as a means through which grief may be expressed and possible reconciliation imagined.
Disease, Environment, and Colonialism in Southeast Asia (Romadhon)
Mary Louise Pratt defines colonial contact zone as a space of encounters between unequal cultural
power and political interests. This course will specifically examine the intersections between humans,
pathogens, and the natural environment as colonial contact zones where knowledge, representation, and
technology meet and collide. Drawing insights from the experiences of European colonial government’s
control over land and animals with motivations to secure the health of European people in the colonies as
well as of modern countries in Southeast Asia in dealing with Euro-American knowledge and technologies
to navigate issues and problems of disease outbreaks, deforestation, natural disasters, and biosecurity, this
course will invite students to exercise different ways of looking at the current politics of medical and
environmental knowledge and to conduct critical exploration on the politics of climate change and
pandemic preparedness.
Biographies of Applicants
Katia Chaterji is a PhD candidate of Southeast Asian History at the University of Washington, where she
specializes in Indonesia within the Indian Ocean world. Her dissertation discusses the relationship between
Islam and the performing arts in the making of regional Islamic histories in Sumatra, Indonesia. Through
this work, she engages with archival, oral history, and dance ethnographic methodologies and has conducted
research in the UK and Indonesia. In the classroom, Katia views the production of art as an important site
for studying how the past is reimagined for contemporary audiences and how arts practitioners make unique
decisions to support or challenge dominant narratives of the past. Alternate sources for the study of history,
such as films, novels, and the performing arts, become valuable instructional tools. Combining her research
focus with her personal experience as a dancer and musician, Katia seeks to encourage students to think
beyond the constraints of traditional disciplinary boundaries and to broaden the possibilities for historical
archives. As a CLIP fellow, Katia’s courses on environmental change and climate disaster will engage with
narratives from literature and the performing arts to highlight a wide range of voices in how we reconcile
with the past and make a home for ourselves in a changing world. Katia has taught courses with the History
and English departments at UW and is currently a Society of Scholars fellow with the Simpson Center for
the Humanities.
Dimas Romadhon is a PhD candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology trained in medical anthropology,
global health, and Southeast Asian studies. Dimas’ research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of medicine, technology, place, identity, and indigenous traditions. His dissertation investigates how people in Indonesia have dealt with global immunity knowledge and the politics surrounding the global measles-
rubella initiative (MRI). Previously, he conducted research on the colonial imagination of Madura Island, Indonesia, as a leprosy island through systematic modification of a local folktale, Ragapadmi. His works
have been published in Global Public Health journal (2020) and in an edited volume on the history of
medicine (NUS Press, forthcoming). Dimas is currently a UW Libraries/Luce Archive Fellow, working on
a literary analysis project of Javanese shadow puppets manuscripts authored by a former Indonesian
political exile, Ki Tristuti Rahmadi. As a CLIP fellow, Dimas will engage with perspectives from the
anthropology of landscape, environmental anthropology, history of medicine, global health, and science,
technology, and society (STS) studies in developing his courses.
2022-23 Academic Year Plan and Supporting Activities
As part of Nature, Memory, and Belonging, students enrolled in the courses above will have the
opportunity to present their final projects to the wider UW community. Students in Heal the World (WIN)
will work towards a photovoice exhibition, where students will utilize the camera lens to capture, document,
and reflect upon an environmental issue of their concern. Similarly, students in The Art of Resistance (SPR)
will produce short films that explore environmental activism and resilience via the performing arts. Visits
to UW libraries and the Burke Museum will be organized accordingly throughout the courses to support
these student projects. We, as instructors, will organize a campus venue to showcase students’ work and
disseminate information to attract audience members from various groups on campus. We will also invite
UW alum Ulil Amri (PhD, 2019), who is currently a Teaching Fellow in Environmental Studies at Gonzaga
University, back to campus for a public talk on renewable energy and eco-spiritualism, and to share his
practical experience conducting environmental research in Southeast Asia. Both topics will be of interest
to undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty at the UW. Additionally, we will collaborate with
the Southeast Asia Center to organize a brown bag lunch bringing together specialists in the Southeast
Asian region who engage with environmental justice, activism, or other related research at the UW. This
event will provide the opportunity to collaborate with the individuals listed below, all from various arenas
on campus, to demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of this work and establish meaningful connections
between traditionally separated departments.
Potential Connections to UW Faculty, Courses, and Programs
In working towards the courses and supporting activities above, we believe there is great potential
in establishing links with the following faculty, courses, and programs:
- CHID 475: S.E. Asia Study Abroad and Dr. Christoph Giebel (History/JSIS), especially students returning from the 2022 (and/or earlier) summer study abroad program in Vietnam.
- ANTH 378 A: Sustainability, Resilience, and Society, taught by Dr. Celia Lowe (Anthropology/JSIS) in Winter/Spring.
- ARCHY 234 A: Trash and Dirt, taught by Dr. Peter Lape (Archaeology/Burke Museum), especially students taking this course in 2023.
- Southeast Asia Center and Dr. Celia Lowe (Environmental Anthropologist and SEAC Director).
- Dr. Rebakah Minarchek (JSIS/Integrated Social Sciences), former Managing Director of the Southeast Asia Center and researcher on environmental justice and natural resource accessibility.
- The Burke Museum and its collections from the Pacific and Southeast Asian regions.
- UW Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences, in particular the work of current graduate students who research fisheries in Southeast Asia.
- Current and ongoing institutional collaborations between UW Southeast Asia Center, UW Pacific Northwest Seismological Network (PNSN) laboratory, and NOAA.
- UW Libraries and Dr. Judith Henchy, in particular their new collection of Adrian Cowell’s film footage on the Shan State drug trade and secessionist war, and colonial-era Philippine materials including those from the 1909 Alaska Yukon Exposition.