Workshop, Universitas Gadjah Mada, 8-10 September 2026

About the Program

Development, or Pembangunan, has been a core aspiration in Indonesia since independence. Extant histories of development in Indonesia have outlined the political and institutional contexts from which development policies arose. This workshop aims to illuminate the historical experiences and tangible impacts of projects mobilised for Indonesia’s economic and social development, which were planned and financed by national and international development agencies. It takes a wide temporal scope aligning with independent Indonesia’s push for development across the Sukarno, New Order and reformasi periods. It also spans a broad geography aligning with development’s nation-building aspirations. read more

Application deadline: 30 November 2025
Research period: 2026

About the program

This program is part of a larger research entitled “Tracing evolutionary pathways in grassroots climate governance: Connecting the past, present, and future inter-scalar adaptation strategies in Southeast Asia – TRACE” based at KITLV and Leiden University, the Netherlands. The Department of History UGM as a partner of this research program invites university students and alumnus who are eager to trace traditional knowledges associated with irrigated agriculture, particularly with wet rice cultivation in Java, Bali, Nusa Tenggara, Sulawesi, and islands of Eastern Indonesia. What kinds of knowledge consulted, how they are stored, and how they relate between different ontological forms are the primary task of the tracing. This program intends to look into layers of memories and reposited knowledges amongst farming communities of irrigated rice agriculture in the archipelago. These layers point to its emergence and entanglements with states, including the traditional kingdoms, sultanates, Dutch Indies colonial state, and the post independence Republic of Indonesia. Through ethnographic/oral history and archival research and by providing a space for farmer/community agency, we intend to work together with farming communities, environmental groups, and the government in order to trace the knowledges that must have been passed down from various generations on the ecological knowledge related to the creation and maintenance of irrigated agriculture. read more

Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage (Re:Sound)

Institutions : Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) and Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
Funding Body : The Dutch Research Council (NWO)
Application Deadline : 5 May 2025
Start Date : 1 August 2025
Duration : 3 years (full-time)

Project Overview

Re:Sound renegotiates Eurocentric understandings, conceptions and curations of “heritage”. This Eurocentrism obscures the coloniality of the history that “heritage” is supposed to narrate and obstructs the access of source community stakeholders to their own “heritage”. There is no scholarly or curatorial model to decenter European agencies and diversify understandings of heritage (curation). Re:Sound bridges this knowledge gap by focusing on sonic heritage, in particular two colonial sound collections from Indonesia, now located in the Netherlands, The Jaap Kunst Collection at the University of Amsterdam, and the Philips Holland Omroep-Hollandse Indies radio broadcasts at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV). read more

The Library of History Department UGM has a collection of history books, books on humanities, text and photo archives, as well as alumni theses. This collection is continually updated through the books donated by the public. Below is the procedure of book donation: