Science of Viruses - 4 March 2025

Conference organized by Benjamin Hegarty, medical anthropologist, Senior Research Associate in the Asia and Pacific Health Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, Research Affiliate at Oxford University, and 2024-2025 research fellow at the Paris IAS (FIAS program) and Frédéric Keck, CNRS Research director and Director of the Laboratory of social anthropology, with the participation of the Institut des Civilisations at Collège de France.

This conference will be followed by the workshop Symbiotic viruses on March 5, 2025 at the Paris IAS.

What do viruses signal about life and death? Viruses cause pandemics, epizootics and plant diseases. At the same time, contemporary virology is highlighting the role of viruses in making possible life on earth. Viral remnants make up 8% of the human genome, and viruses play a crucial role in regulating the earth’s biochemical processes. Bacteriophages (specialized viruses that infect bacteria) are being tested as novel therapeutics for anti-microbial resistant bacteria. Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic, a moment that sparked intensive reflection on the intimacy of the human species with viruses and their entanglement at a planetary scale, the relations between viruses, hosts, and their environment has never been more important. This public panel discussion reflects on the changing scientific and technological view of viruses across the 20th century. It will also include a presentation by artist Taiwan-based artist Pei-Ying Lin on her work, Virophilia.

Participants

- Angela Creager (Princeton University, Paris IAS)
- Benjamin Hegarty (Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, Oxford, Paris IAS)
- Frederic Keck (CNRS, LAS)
- Eben Kirksey (University of Oxford)
- Pei-Ying Lin (designer and artist)

Symbiotic Viruses - 5 March 2025

Study day organised by Benjamin Hegarty, medical anthropologist, Senior Research associate at Kirby Institute, UNSW Syndey, Research afiliate at Oxford University, and 2024-2025 research-fellow the Paris IAS (FIAS program) and Frédéric Keck, CNRS Research Director and Director of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology.

In the wake of their lecture The science of viruses: symbiotic possibilities on the 4th of March, 2025 at the Collège de France, Benjamin Hegarty and Frédéric Keck are organising a study day devoted to specialists in the field of viruses, their life and evolution, and their interactions within environments and with human and non-human species.

Program

9am - 9.30am: Welcome

9.30am - 11am: Interspecies relations
Interspecies mixing has been a key target of surveillance and pandemic preparedness, focused intensively on risks of ‘zoonotic spillover,’ when viruses that commonly circulate among non-human animals are passed to a human host. The techniques and practices associated with ‘emerging infectious diseases’ have focused on intensifying boundaries between humans and non-humans. The complex ecological, social, and epidemiological factors that transform non-human viruses into virulent pathogens require a detailed understanding of interspecies relations in the contemporary world.
- Hervé Bourhy (Institut Pasteur)
- Nan Nan (Laboratory of Social Anthropology)
- Jules Villa (Institut Pasteur)

11am - 11.30am: Break

11.30am - 1pm: Ecological perspectives on viruses
Viruses offer new perspectives on the environment. These perspectives, formalized by disease ecology, highlight that environmental changes can alter relations between viruses and its hosts. An ecological perspective on viruses, including the potential impact of changes in relations between human and non-human animals, can help us understand how symbiotic viruses become pathogenic in changing ecological conditions at the planetary scale.
- Eben Kirskey (Oxford University)
- Tamara Gilles-Vernick (Institut Pasteur)
- Camille Besombes (Sciences Po)

1pm - 1.30pm: Lunch

1.30pm - 2.45pm: Sensing microbial futures for the river Seine [in front of the Paris IAS]

Among the fish, eels, insects, frogs, and plants, viruses are likely the most numerous agents in the Seine river. This includes pathogens that cause diseases, like noroviruses (NoV) but it also includes good or harmless viruses, including bacteriophages, viruses that eat bacteria. Some of these viruses specifically target pathogenic bacteria like E. coli, and have been used in microbial surveillance since the early 20th century.

After taking a sample of the water of the river Seine, and contemplating its viral composition, the artist Pei-Ying Lin will provide a speculative narrative about viral relations through a dialogue with the historian Claas Kirchhelle. It will conclude with a picnic of oysters and fermented foods, inviting new appreciation of the role of microbes, including viruses, in shaping the links between ecologies and metabolism. How can we sense viruses so that we can learn about the shared histories and futures of microbial life for Seine river ecologies?
- Benjamin Hegarty (Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, Oxford University, Paris IAS)
- Claas Kirchhelle (CERMES3)
- Pei-Ying Lin (designer and artist)
- Joanna Wong and Christy Nguyen (Collectif Enoki)

2.45 - 4.15pm: Viruses, therapeutics and immunity
Understanding viruses has played a central role in the development of therapeutics and in concepts of immunity, and led to recognizing their complex role beyond pathogens. Although already identified in the early 20th century in Paris by bacteriologist Felix d’Herelle, bacteriophages (bacteria-eating viruses) have recently been revisited as therapies for anti-microbial resistance. Reflecting on the therapeutic possibilities of viruses can reveal more dynamic possibilities for host-virus-environment relations and the infrastructures that make them possible.
- Charlotte Brives (CNRS, University of Bordeaux)
- Beth Greenhough (Oxford University)
- Claas Kirchhelle (CERMES3)
- Benjamin Hegarty (Kirby Institute, UNSW Sydney, Oxford University, Paris IAS) and Eben Kirskey (Oxford University)

4.15pm - 4.30pm: Break

4.30pm - 5.30pm: Global health and symbiotic viruses
Although metaphors of ‘war on viruses’ persist, virologists and others have long held that viruses should be thought on less antagonistic terms. As Nobel-prize winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg argued, ‘the very essence of the virus is its fundamental entanglement with the genetic and metabolic machinery of the host.’ Seeing viruses from a symbiotic perspective can help to chart alternative perspectives on the history and future of global and planetary health.
- Jean-Paul Gaudillière (CERMES3)
- Guillaume Lachenal (Sciences Po)
- Christos Lynteris (University of St Andrews)

Eben Eben

Symbiotic viruses: More-than-human anthropology, queer theory, and virology

In September 2024, I started a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris for the 2024/2025 northern hemisphere academic year. I am working on a new project on “symbiotic viruses,“ including the “Good Boy” or human pegivirus, which you can find out more about by watching this video!

My stay at the Paris IAS is part of the French Institutes for advanced Study fellowship program - FIAS  - co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 945408. His fellowship also benefits from the support of the RFIEA+ LABEX, with a national funding (Grant ANR-11-LABX-0027-01). I am grateful to this funders for their generous support of my stay in Paris.

There’s a Good Boy: making kin with a symbiotic virus

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 • 03:30PM - 05:00PM

A02 Social Sciences Building, Room 441

Free

This seminar is hosted by the Sydney Student and Staff Workshop in Anthropological Research Methods (SSSWARM), Sydney Southeast Asia Centre (SSEAC) and the School of Social and Political Sciences' Discipline of Anthropology.

Presenter: Ben Hegarty (UNSW)

Virological research is now attending to the possibility that not all viruses cause disease. Some viruses may even be good for us. In this paper, I discuss opportunities for theorising viral symbiosis drawing on my research about the human pegivirus, also known as the ‘Good Boy Virus.’ Good Boy was accidentally discovered in 1995 in the context of hepatitis research. Since then, Good Boy was found to have beneficial impacts for people living with HIV and Ebola, and even touted as a potential 'biovaccine' at a moment of increasing antimicrobial resistance. An ethnography of the human pegivirus offers an ideal opportunity to develop a theoretical account of multispecies symbiosis, in turn opening new vistas on how to live ethically with viruses. However, viruses are notoriously tricky to study as a participant observer: they are microscopic and can be dangerous to human and non-human hosts. This paper will bring together concepts and approaches from virology, queer theory, and more-than-human anthropology, to invite participants into a dialogue about how ethnographic methods can advance new understandings of multispecies relations through an empirical, multisited account of the Good Boy virus.

"I'll be a Good Boy", Kelvin Atmadibrata. WhatsApp messages and photograph taken with iPhone8 camera. Image reproduced with permission from the artist.

Michael Edwards, michael.edwards@sydney.edu.au

1869 Podcast with Benjamin Hegarty, author of The Made-Up State

In this episode, we speak with Benjamin Hegarty, author of The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia. Benjamin Hegarty is McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne and a Research Fellow at the HIV AIDS Research Center for Health Policy and Social Innovation, Atma Jaya Catholic University. He has published articles in the Journal of Asian Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere.

We spoke to Benjamin about the complexity of transgender rights during this time of growing visibility in the United States, Indonesia, and globally, the historical relationship in Indonesia between race and gender and how they were governed through regulations on dress and appearance, and the culturally sanctioned areas of public life that Indonesian trans women have been allowed to participate in, both past and present.

If you’d like to purchase Benjamin’s book, use the promo code 09POD to save 30 percent on our website which is cornellpress.cornell.edu. If you live in the UK use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk.

Made-Up State Book Discussion Event 22nd of September - Deakin Downtown & Online

In person at Deakin Downtown 727 Collins Street Tower 2 Level 12 Melbourne, VIC 3008 and online.

To watch the recording access the link here - Friday 22nd of September, 3.30pm.

The SSN is delighted to launch Benjamin Hegarty's new book, published by Cornell University Press. Join us for an introductory talk by Ben. The discussion will include reflections from Carla Jones, (Associate Professor in Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder), Alegra Wolter (Transgender Activist and Medical Doctor, Suara Kita, Indonesia), and Chris Hanssmann (Assistant Professor in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at University of California, Davis).

Whilst we encourage attendance at Deakin Downtown, it will also be livestreamed for our regional and global audience.

In The Made-Up State, Benjamin Hegarty contends that warias, who compose one of Indonesia's trans feminine populations, have cultivated a distinctive way of captivating the affective, material, and spatial experiences of belonging to a modern public sphere. Combining historical and ethnographic research, Hegarty traces the participation of warias in visual and bodily technologies, ranging from psychiatry and medical transsexuality to photography and feminine beauty.

The concept of development deployed by the modern Indonesian state relies on naturalizing the binary of "male" and "female." As historical brokers between gender as a technological system of classifying human difference and state citizenship, warias shaped the contours of modern selfhood even while being positioned as nonconforming within it. The Made-Up State illuminates warias as part of the social and technological format of state rule, which has given rise to new possibilities for seeing and being seen as a citizen in postcolonial Indonesia.

Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of queer and transgender studies, science and technology studies, and global health. His research is based on research with transgender communities in Indonesia. Before joining the Global Health Program at the the Kirby Institute at UNSW, Benjamin was a McKenzie Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne (2019-2022). His ethnographic and historical research appears in Visual Anthropology Review, Ethos, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the Journal of Asian Studies. Benjamin is a member of the Editorial Board of American Ethnologist.

You can learn more about Ben, and download his free e-book, on his website

A limited number of books will be for sale on the day at $20 each; all proceeds will go to the Waria Crisis Centre in Yogyakarta for projects related to trans health and housing.

Image cover of the Made-Up State

Love Buzz Podcast: In Between Season - Benjamin Hegarty, The Made-Up State [Bahasa Indonesia]

Seturut perjalanan waktu, makna sebuah kata dapat berubah menyesuaikan konteks zaman. Transpuan di Indonesai juga berpatisipasi dalam sejarah perjuangan dan pembangunan bangsa Indonesia. Episode ini ada PenulisThe Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity and Citizenship in Indonesia, Benjamin Hegarty. Ben membagi analisis historis dan etnografis perkara interaksi antara tata kelola kota dan teknologi dengan kelompok trans feminin di Indonesia.

Sex is Complex: Discussing Sex and Gender Across Anthropology

I am invited speaker at an online event held by the American Anthropological Association, organised by Dr Rine Vieth, McGill University.

Register here

When and Where

  • Start Date 3/23/2023 6:00 PM EDT

  • End Date 3/23/2023 7:30 PM EDT

How can anthropological expertise on sex and gender help us better understand the complexities of the world around us, particularly in the face of increasing legislation targeting transgender people and efforts at equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI)? This panel discussion–featuring scholars from all four fields of anthropology–will delve deeply into sex and gender as categories, drawing on things like cross-cultural approaches, biological studies, and feminist theory. Non-anthropologists and anthropologists alike are warmly welcome!

Panelists: 

  • Dr. Kate Clancy - Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  • Gabby Omoni Hartemann - PhD candidate, Department of Anthropology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais

  • Dr. Benjamin Hegarty - Researcher at the Kirby Institute, University of New South Wales

  • Dr. Rae Jereza - Senior Researcher at the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab (PERIL) and Research Assistant Professor at the School of Public Affairs at American University

Discussant: 

  • Dr. Rine Vieth, McGill University

PrEP on Trial: the Future of HIV in Indonesian Policy Worlds - CASTAC Blog Post

Such forms of inequality remain acutely felt by Indonesian transgender and MSM populations. Against the backdrop of the PrEP trial, even earlier forms of testing and treatment, as well as other forms of hospital care, are by no means assured. In Indonesia, viral load testing remains rare, given that patients must pay for themselves, and medication stockouts are not unheard of. Laboratory equipment needed to undertake viral load tests are often unavailable or broken. At the same time, tidak terdeteksi (undetectable) has emerged as an important moral force for people living with HIV in Indonesia, even as it circulates alongside a widespread concern for managing outer bodily signs of the virus, tied to the quality of skin tone, hair, and weight (Hegarty 2021). Yet even as they circulate as a part of global discourse, giving rise to new forms of morality and personhood, the technologies that give rise to being “undetectable” are – like PrEP – not available to everyone and on the same terms. As such, HIV technologies such as PrEP do not represent a teleological progression towards self-surveilling subjects but emerge against a backdrop of persistent forms of global inequality and their colonial histories that unfold in the present.

Read more at the CASTAC Blog

2022 ANU Indonesia Update - Gender equality and diversity in Indonesia: identifying progress and challenges

I am an invited speaker at the 2022 ANU Indonesia Update, on the topic of Gender equality and diversity in Indonesia: identifying progress and challenges.

The Update was held at the ANU in Canberra, 16-17 September 2022. Further details here: https://indonesia.crawford.anu.edu.au/activities/indonesia-update/2022-indonesia-update

My paper abstract is as follows:

Transgender Citizenship and the Making of Public Gender in Indonesia

During reformasi, the hope that visibility will transform into recognition is by no means equally assured for all citizens. As fierce contestation over LGBT belonging in Indonesia has shown, gender and sexuality remain central to how the boundaries of Indonesian citizenship are drawn. Against this backdrop, the transgender feminine populations known as waria and transpuan have continued to successfully leverage their historical visibility to seek access to citizenship rights at the national and regional level. This paper contextualises transgender belonging as a minority form of citizenship that articulates why gender poses a problem for national belonging. It looks to two moments. The first introduces the emergence of the first organised waria organisations in Jakarta in the late 1960s. Although framed as a public nuisance generated by their lower class status and public sexuality, warias used this visibility to assert belonging as a kind of “legal but nonconforming status.” That is, it was understood that they did not fit the state’s model of binary gender, but nevertheless received special concessions to be visible under certain conditions. The second describes recent mobilisation among transpuan and waria to access state-issued identity cards (KTP), underway since the mid-2010s. Transpuan and waria were deeply invested in cards, both for the reason that they would grant access to state services, but also because accessing them would grant their nonconforming status further legitimacy. The state’s definition of binary gender is not fixed but a struggle to impose order on the meanings of various signs and the individuals that they index. Both during and after the New Order, gender remains a problem so long as it serves as a way to determine the boundaries of belonging in “public,” a concept that is not necessarily coterminous with the nation or the state.

Anthropology Research Seminar at Leiden University - Identity cards, semiotic instability, and signs of state recognition for Indonesian warias

I will present at the Leiden University anthropology research seminar series on 6 October 2022.

In Indonesia, the period of exuberant democratization that followed the authoritarian New Order (1965-1998) saw the state-issued identity card transformed into a visual symbol available for reproduction by ordinary citizens. One Indonesian transgender population known as warias, whose gendered mobility and kinship challenges the fixity of bureaucratic fictions, used the card to engage with the terms of recognition offered by the state. Following the introduction of sweeping public nuisance regulations that excluded them from public spaces, in 2014, warias in Yogyakarta made cards that closely mimicked but did not copy the visual form of the original. Yet this was not a card that was designed to replace the authentic state identity card but reworked its powers of recognition to new ends. Warias use of cards prompted a reckoning with the hopeful and dangerous prospect that the state did not hold a monopoly over powers of recognition.

Based on research undertaken in fieldwork in Yogyakarta and Jakarta since 2014, this paper positions warias engagement with identity cards to theorize the broader semiotic instability of state citizenship. A focus on bureaucratic citizenship as a visual medium helps to interpret the signs of the state as vulnerable to the open-ended meanings of things.

About Benjamin Hegarty

Benjamin Hegarty is an anthropologist and the author of Cornell University Press's The Made-Up State: Technology, Trans Femininity, and Citizenship in Indonesia.

His research interests span medical anthropology, transgender studies, and Southeast Asian studies. He is drawn to ethnographic research because of its experimental, collaborative, and interdisciplinary potential.

Hybrid Book talk and discussion ‘Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia’ by Prof. Patricia Spyer

Before this Research Seminar, at the same location, the [hybrid] Book talk and discussion ‘Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia’ by Prof. Patricia Spyer takes place. 

If you would like to join the book talk, please register. 

For further detalis and to register: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2022/10/rs-cads---benjamin-hegarty

Conceptualising Open Ethnography from Indonesia

This first public webinar of Jaringan Ethnografi Terbuka (JET) - the Network for Open Ethnography - seeks to define ‘etnografi terbuka.’ The panellists will discuss the ethnographic encounters they have led or experienced and reimagine the possibility of ethnographic processes and and experience that are open, experimental, and collaborative. This webinar will invite participants to interactively rethink the ethnographic process and define together ‘open ethnography‘ with the panellists.

Seminar publik pertama dari Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka (JET) ini akan mendiskusikan apa yang kami maksud dengan ‘etnografi terbuka’.

Meskipun sudah ada kerangka pikir tentang etnografi terbuka seperti Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), 'etnografi terbuka' yang kami rancang fokus ke dalam proses dan praktik etnografi yang berkomitmen pada pendekatan yang kolaboratif, mengedepankan akses, rasa kepedulian, komunitas, dan cara berpikir dekolonial.

Para panelis akan mendiskusikan keterlibatan mereka sebagai peneliti atau partisipan dalam proyek etnografi dan membayangkan kembali kemungkinan proses dan pengalaman etnografi yang lebih terbuka, eksperimental, dan kolaboratif.

Seminar ini akan mengajak peserta secara interaktif memikirkan kembali proses etnografi dan mendefinisikan bersama ‘etnografi terbuka’ bersama para panelis.

Ini adalah acara pertama dalam rangkaian Kosakata Etnografi Terbuka yang JET sedang kembangkan.

Panellists:

  • Dr Benjamin Hegarty, The University of Melbourne

  • Dr Annisa Beta, The University of Melbourne

  • Ben Laksana, Arkademy Project and Victoria University of Wellington

  • Zara Aisyah Fauziah, Sanggar Swara

Thursday 2 June 2022, 2pm-3.30pm (Indonesia, Western)

About the network

Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka (JET) merupakan inisiatif Dr Benjamin Hegarty dan Dr Annisa R. Beta dari University of Melbourne (Australia) bersama PUI-PT PPH Unika Atma Jaya (Indonesia) di awal tahun 2022. JET didukung oleh hibah Indonesia Engagement dari University of Melbourne.

Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka bertujuan menjadi wadah bagi peneliti (termasuk peneliti di universitas, aktivis dan komunitas) dan masyarakat sipil di Indonesia untuk berbagi pengetahuan dan pengalaman terkait metode etnografi serta mengembangkan metode penelitian dengan pendekatan etnografi yang kolaboratif dan kreatif.

Etnografi sering dianggap sebagai metode yang hanya cocok diterapkan dalam penelitian komunitas kecil atau terbatas. Metode-metode etnografi terkini sebenarnya dapat menjadi alat untuk mengkaji berbagai isu terkait media, politik, kesehatan, identitas, dan konflik secara responsif dan mendalam. JET berencana mengembangkan website, menerbitkan sumber bacaan, video, dan juga podcast untuk menjadikan etnografi sebagai metodologi penelitian sosial-budaya menjadi lebih mudah dipahami dan dapat dilakukan oleh lebih banyak peneliti di Indonesia.

Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka (JET) was initiated by Dr Benjamin Hegarty and Dr Annisa R. Beta from the University of Melbourne (Australia) with PUI-PT PPH Unika Atma Jaya (Indonesia) in early 2022. JET is supported by an Indonesia Engagement grant from the University of Melbourne.

Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka aims to be a forum for researchers (including researchers at universities, activists and communities) and civil society in Indonesia to share knowledge and experiences related to ethnographic methods and to develop ethnographic research methods that are committed to collaboration and creative approaches.

Ethnography is often considered a method that is only suitable in small or limited community-based research. Current ethnographic methods can actually be a tool to examine various issues related to media, politics, health, identity, and conflict in a responsive and in-depth manner. JET plans to develop a website, publish reading resources, videos, and podcasts to make ethnography easier to be understood and practiced by more researchers in Indonesia.

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/conceptualising-open-ethnography-from-indonesia-tickets-336919052957

Basic Ethnographic Methods Workshop [Metode Pelatihan Etnografi Dasar]

On 19 May 2022, myself (Ben Hegarty) and Amalia Handayani (further information below) ran a workshop (tentatively titled an “ethno-walk!“) based on a modified version of STS scholars Joe Dumit’s “teaching the implosion“ exercise, in which participants select an object, and then locate it according to several analytical or thematic concerns in groups; for example, material, historical, embodied/sensory, economic etc. A difference with Joe Dumit’s original exercise is that we included objects along with people and that we simplified some of the questions. The exercise was undertaken in Indonesian.

Held in person on the campus of Atma Jaya Catholic University in central Jakarta, participants came from a range of institutions, organisations, and diverse motivations for attending. Some participants expressed, quite simply, a curiosity as to what ethnography means or what ethnographic methods entail. Others came from civil society organisations, or community organisations, and wanted to get their own research projects up and running (or had been the subject of research projects). Yet others were from PPH Atma Jaya, the Center for HIV AIDS research, and were looking for ways to integrate ethnography into the practice of global health research.

Ben Hegarty and Amalia Handayani, the facilitators, have established a practice of collaborative ethnography across the COVID-19 pandemic through their research with HIV outreach workers for MSM (men who have sex with men). This led to various experiments in research and writing, that were not only focused on output - the quest for more data - but took seriously questions of process and infrastructure. Of particular concern was navigating the uneven terrain of the political economy of knowledge, within which Hegarty (University of Melbourne) and Handayani (Atma Jaya Catholic University, Jakarta) are both participants in different ways (for more on this see Raewyn Connell’s book, The Good University).

How can we envisage more equitable and less extractive forms of knowledge production and circulation (both in terms of teaching, and research)? What stakes do different communities and organisations have in shaping what knowledge is accessible to who, and how? Inspired by historical and contemporary experiments in ethnographic practice that prioritise collaboration (like the PECE platform), this event - and the Jaringan Ethnography Terbuka [Network for Open Ethnography] of which this workshop was affiliated - was an experiment in practicing ethnography that was attentive to process and infrastructures as much as it is on output.

Workshop rundown

  • Participants introduced one another (10 minutes); (using a format that I had first seen in Kirin Narayan’s wonderful graduate seminar on ethnographic writing), they were asked to take notes on one another’s name; institution or community; and one thing they wanted to take away from the day. Participants were encouraged to group with someone that they did not know. In one sense, this activity was an exercise in ethnographic attentiveness (a skill for interviewing, participant observation, and so on).

  • Participants gathered around a circle and we introduced the activity (20 minutes); participants were instructed to go for a walk in groups of three or four people, and in discussion and collaboration settle on an object or person that caught their attention (within the boundary of the campus). They were told to record it in whatever way they could; notes, photograph, sound recording, or (if possible) by taking the object back with them for discussion. In the case of a person, participants were instructed to approach them directly and to solicit their participation in the exercise. Participants were shown a series of categories with which they could consider/locate/interpret that object; political, economic, material, sensory/embodied.

  • Participants went on a walk (30 minutes); in their small groups, participants went to various corners of the university campus. Within their groups, they discussed what was interesting - what was not - and what they could settle on to discuss. Each group selected something different (and indeed, objects that I had noticed but not investigated further). These included a carved statue from the Biak region on the island of Papua positioned midway point of a staircase; a gilt chair in a glass box; and me (!), an anthropologist from Australia.

  • Participants returned to discuss in groups (20 minutes); participants returned to their groups to discuss what they had found, how they had found it, and why they had settled on it. We introduced to them several further questions, which we ‘revealed‘ by folding down the paper where the categories for analysis were written.

  • These further questions were:

    • Politics: who are the institutions involved in regulating the object? Who has an interest in it? Are there any conflicts in regulating the object between actors? What forms of solidarity can be developed through this object?

    • Economics: who produces, markets, sells, buys, and consumes this object? Where? How is the object produced, distributed, and consumed? How is this object connected within a broader global economic system (national or global)?

    • Material: what is the object made of? Where are its components from? Who made it? In what ways is the object used? Until what point can the object be used? What happens when it is disposed of?

    • Senses: what does the object feel like? What is the experience of: smell, sound, sight, taste, touch? Will someone with a different, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, social class, religion, or dis/ability experience it differently?

    • History: What is your first recollection of this object? What else was going on at that point in time? What information is is already provided about this object? Who is connected to this object (users, creators, etc)?

  • Participants presented their ethnographic object and analysis (30 minutes; participants discussed their object in groups according to the questions asked, noting down responses based on the information that they had gathered. One representative from each group then presented the findings from their group. The responses were modified according to the kind of object that each person had gathered. For example, the sculpture of the Biak was a commemoration of a world association of Catholic universities in the late 1980s. There was, however, very little information about the object, who created it, and why it stood for that particular event.

  • We wrapped up the exercise, summarising the key points (20 minutes); we encouraged people to position themselves in relation to the object that they had chosed; why had they selected that particular object, and not another? What were the limitations of what they could know about the object? How were these limitations set or overcome? What did they learn about the arrangement of objects or persons in space, and their political, material, economic and sensory entanglements?

  • Through this excerise, students were encouraged to settle on everyday objects and position themselves as a part of the research process, rather than set apart from it. In doing so, with these broad categories, participants could see the kinds of shifts faciltiated by changes in scale, of perspective, and of method of engagement. In doing so, they could understand how knowledge is produced reflexively, that is, how their own position in time and space (and the array of contingencies that produces the possibility for that to happen) might shape what they know, what questions they ask, what they notice, and what they do not notice.

Solidaritas Pengetahuan dalam Krisis Pandemi  

Ethnolab #2: Solidaritas Pengetahuan dalam Krisis Pandemi  

Berlangsung pada Selasa, 17 Mei 2022, jam 10.00- 15.00 di Kantor KUNCI Study Forum & Collective

Jl. Ngadinegaran MJ III/100 Yogyakarta, 55143 

Pandemi COVID-19 yang melanda Indonesia sejak 2020 menimbulkan banyak kebijakan yang kerap berganti cepat dan membawa dampak yang beragam pada kehidupan sehari-hari. Proses penelitian pun ikut terpengaruh, misalnya banyak orang menjadi terbiasa dengan pengambilan data yang dilakukan secara daring. Beragam pertanyaan lantas muncul:  Pengetahuan seperti apa yang dibutuhkan dan dihasilkan ketika banyak komunitas menghadapi krisis pandemi? Bagaimana cara pengetahuan ini diproduksi dan disebarkan? Data seperti apa yang dibutuhkan dan dengan cara  apa data-data ini seharusnya disampaikan? Apa batasan dari kerja-kerja berbasis riset ini dan manfaatnya, baik pada komunitas yang terlibat maupun di kehidupan sosial secara umum? Bagaimana solidaritas terbentuk lewat kerja-kerja ini? 

Pertanyaan-pertanyaan ini membingkai lokakarya Ethnolab yang akan diselenggarakan kedua kalinya di KUNCI. Ethnolab kali ini bertema: Solidaritas Pengetahuan dalam Krisis Pandemi dan diselenggarakan melalui kerjasama antara KUNCI dan Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka  (JET) yang diinisiasi oleh Benjamin Hegarty dan Annisa R. Beta dari Universitas Melbourne dan PPH Unika Atma Jaya Jakarta. 

Acara ini melibatkan empat narasumber: Ignatius ‘Gambit’ Praptoraharjo (peneliti dan direktur PPH Unika Atma Jaya Jakarta), Masthuriyah Sa'dan (peneliti feminisme Islam dan studi transgender), Sidhi Vhisatya (arsiparis Queer Indonesia Archive), Tamarra (seniman dan mahasiswa sejarah Univ. Sanata Dharma ) dan dipandu oleh Amalia Puri Handayani (PPH Unika Atma Jaya Jakarta),  Benjamin Hegarty (Univ.  Melbourne) dan Ferdiansyah Thajib (Univ. Leipzig, KUNCI). 

Sebagai catatan, lokakarya ini mempersyaratkan tingkat partisipasi yang tinggi. Karena tempat terbatas, untuk mengikuti lokakarya ini silakan mendaftarkan diri dengan mengontak: editor@kunci.or.id dan menyampaikan apa motivasi Anda dalam bergabung. Pendaftaran dibuka sampai tanggal 10 Mei 2022.

Website Ethnolab di sini.

Coronavirus Multispecies Reading Group - Ben Hegarty & HIV specialists panel on navigating HIV visibility in Indonesia: March 28, 2022

We are delighted to converse with McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow Benjamin Hegarty (U of Melbourne) on his latest publication concerning HIV visibility in an Indonesian context, "The Biosocial Body" (2022, Ethos). Joining him for the dialogue will be medical anthropologist and HIV specialists Ferdi Thajib (PhD candidate, Freie Universität Berlin), and Annemarie Samuels (Associate Prof, Leiden University). This exciting cross-talk panel will examine dynamics of HIV visibility in Indonesia, extending Hegarty's continued research on the vital role of peer outreach workers who aid clients in navigating access to clinics and pharmaceutical treatment amidst the chronic underfunding of accessible healthcare, and an increasing bureaucratization of HIV management. This work carefully attends to the ways in which clients must also navigate the politics of visibility, self-presentation and gender performance in order to access life-saving pharmaceuticals and biomedical knowledge or else risk being considered "lost to follow up."


"Transgender and technology in Indonesia (1930-1980)" - TransAsiaSTS

Recording of the January 2022 TransAsiaSTS monthly meeting, with presentations from:

1. Benjamin Hegarty, McKenzie Fellow, Anthropology at The University of Melbourne, on "Transgender and technology in Indonesia (1930-1980)".

2. Yuti Ariani, Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, on "How do we care about a handicapped land? (A study on Indonesian peatland)".

Access the video recording here:

https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/january-2022-transasiasts-monthly-meeting

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands on which I live and work. I pay my respects to the Kulin Nation and all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders.

Profile photograph credits: George Downing

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