Doctoral Dissertation Research: Social Movements and Scientific Forestry: Examining the Community Forestry Movement in Indonesia

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Scientific knowledge is created by people and institutions with particular situated and partial perspectives and has been critically shaped by domestic and international political, economic, and cultural forces. In various contexts, the development of environmental science, such as community forestry, has been enriched with the collaborations of forestry scholars with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), public pressure groups, community-based organizations, and local people. Nevertheless, the social possibilities of their work have been largely understudied. Basic lack of understanding about the relationship between scholars and civil society relates to a more general pattern of analysis of environment and development that positions academic forestry scholars and professional foresters merely as an apparatus of state power. This doctoral dissertation research project will investigate the cultural aspects and spatial dynamics of collaboration between social movements and forestry science in Indonesia. The doctoral candidate plans to study the complex and contradictory position of Indonesian academic foresters in order to understand their social, political, and scholarly framing of forests, how they mediate their political position and knowledge with the state, capital, and social movements, and how this position has affected the constitution of community-managed forests as an object of knowledge. The student will study the adoption of gendered local knowledge promoted by and circulated within social movements into academic forestry science as well as the possible role of alternative forestry science in shaping social movements. The doctoral candidate will use a multi-sited ethnographic approach to follow key figures and institutions across scales that are local, national, and transnational in nature. Specific methods that will be used include participant-observation, structured and open-ended interviews, and archival research including historical study.This dissertation research will examine the complex interaction between culture, power, and material realities within collaborations between academic scholars and members of social movements. The project will move beyond place-based studies of traditional ecological knowledge to explore how natural scientific knowledge fits in to complex social and political processes. The research will investigate issues of practical importance for ongoing societal relations in the developing world by describing important intersections of natural scientific knowledge and political action. By examining the knowledge, actions, and cultures of academic forestry scholars in line with their alliance with members of social-justice-oriented environmental movements, this project will provide significant contributions to basic understanding of how to effectively integrate natural scientific knowledge with civil society and politics. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.