Arie is a lecturer at the Department of Politics and Government, Gadjah Mada University (UGM). He is also a researcher at the Papua Working Group. He has participated in many research projects in the area of local development, state-society relations, public service, governance innovation, and conflict management in Papua and other area in Indonesia. In 2015 Arie received a doctoral scholarship from the Indonesian Endowment for Education (LPDP) and joined the doctoral researcher at the International Development Department, University of Birmingham, UK. His research focuses on the territorial reform as a mode of state-building, particularly by looking at the state-society relations in the newly established local governments in Papua. He has just concluded his fieldwork in Papua and Jakarta last August where he had interviewed with more than 100 resource persons from various background.

Carol Colfer is a Senior Associate (anthropologist) with CIFOR (Center for International Forestry Research, Bogor, Indonesia); and a Visiting Fellow at CIIFAD (Cornell Institute for  International Food and Agricultural Development) at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. She has long, ethnographic experience in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the United States; and global, forest-related experience in criteria and indicators, adaptive collaborative management and governance. Her interests include gender and diversity, people and forests, health and population, and conservation and development issues

Chloe King is a student and researcher at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., studying international affairs and sustainability. She worked in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines as a PADI Divemaster, and researched the effects of tourism on coastal communities across Indonesia, from South Sulawesi and Java to West Papua to East Flores. In D.C., she has worked with the World Wildlife Fund for over two years on food waste initiatives in K-12 schools in DC, and founded the company Last Call in 2017 to address restaurant food waste in her community.

David Xu Borgonjon is a writer. He has written for The New York Times, Rhizome, and the Journal for Chinese Contemporary Art, among others. He curated “Really, Socialism?!” (Momenta Art, 2015), “The Visible Hand” (CUE Art Foundation, 2017), and “In Search of Miss Ruthless” (Para Site, 2017) with Hera Chan. He co-founded Admin, a platform for arts administrators working on new cultural institutions (www.admin.network). Based in New York, he teaches at Rhode Island School of Design and is completing a Ph.D. at Columbia University on the racialized economy in colonial Asia.

Faizah Zakaria specializes in modern Southeast Asian history and global environmental history. Prior to doctoral studies, she was a Public Service Commission (PSC) Local Merit Scholar and subsequently taught Mathematics and Project Work at a junior college. Since then, she has ventured away from science to explore areas closer to her heart: environmental, social and subaltern histories in the linguistically and racially diverse Southeast Asian region she calls home. To this end, she obtained an M.A in Southeast Asian Studies from NUS, winning the Benjamin Batson Gold Medal in 2011. Her doctoral dissertation won the Arthur and Mary Prize for outstanding at Yale and her research has received support from the Henry Luce MacMillan Center International Dissertation Research Grant, the Tan Ean Kiam Scholarship for the Humanities, the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant and the Charles Kao Fund Research Grant. Her work "Genealogy as Historical Right in the Bataklands and its Malayan Diaspora" won the best conference student paper prize awarded by the Association of Asian Studies Indonesian and Timor Leste Study Committee in March 2017. Outside the academy, she also engages in public history and creative writing and has won a few minor prizes, most recently in the Golden Point Awards (2017) by the Singapore National Arts Council. For the academic year 2017-18, she is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies at Cornell University.

Francisia SSE Seda was born in Jakarta, 1962. She completed her bachelor's degree in Sociology, from the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, at the University of Indonesia (1987) with a thesis entitled, "Covert Curriculum and Individual Modernity: School Case Studies As Socialization Agency.”  Her postgraduate studies began with a (Master of Arts / MA) in Asian Studies from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, U.S. (1989) where she wrote a thesis titled, "The Politics of Development: A Case Study of The Asahan (Aluminum) Project in North Sumatra (Indonesia), " She was awarded a Ph.D. in Development Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in (2001) with a dissertation titled, "Petroleum Paradox: Natural Resources and Development in Indonesia, 1967-1997.”  Dr. Seda specializes in Sociology, Economic Change (Sociology of Development) and has a research interests in the field of Environmental Sociology, Gender Sociology, Poverty and Exclusion Social, and Sociological Theory.

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She is currently a permanent lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences (where she has been since 1990) and an lecturer at Driyarkara STF (2001-present). She is also the Chair of the Postgraduate Program, Department of Sociology, Fisip-UI (2005-2008), and previously was the Chair of the Community Editorial Board of the Journal of Sociology, Department of Sociology, FISIP-UI (2008-2016). Finally, she is the Chair of the Department of Sociology, FISIP-UI (2017-Present).

Lisa is a junior at Yale studying economics and human rights. Last year, she took a gap year on the Thomas C. Barry Fellowship to work for conservation and community development NGOs in Ubud. She is interested in the intersection between technology and society and is now working at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking to research how technology can be more inclusive.

Moniek van Rheenen is a 3rd year doctoral student in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her dissertation project investigates how female Muslim activist groups in Padang and Jakarta rely on gendered language ideologies on social media and messaging applications like WhatsApp to circulate and ‘viralize’ media content online in order to influence offline political events. Moniek received her B.A. from Cornell University in English and Spanish and is an affiliated researcher at Andalas University and the State Islamic University of Jakarta in Indonesia.

Russell Toth is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Economics at the University of Sydney. He is a development microeconomist, with primary research interests in the development of the private sector in developing and emerging market countries. His research often involves primary data collection, with a focus on field sites in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He has been involved in research in Indonesia since 2009, beginning with a Ph.D. dissertation on the role of financial and human capital constraints in household enterprise outcomes. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.

Shaianne Osterreich is an Associate Professor the Chair of the Economics Department at Ithaca College. Her research interests include international trade, poverty alleviation, and gender, and she has been working on/with Indonesia since 2006. In 2005-2006 she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia. She has worked on the linkages between Indonesian manufacturing and the Decent Work agenda, put forth by the ILO and the Government of Indonesia. She is also interested in looking at the gender differentiated employment effects of industrial variation related to globalization (exports, foreign direct investment, etc). She teaches courses on Globalization and Human Development, Gender, Race, and Economic Power, and Capitalism.

Simon Richter is the Class of 1942 Term Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Simon is an environmental humanist with an emphasis on German and Dutch literature and culture. Trained as a Goethe scholar, he has, over the course of his career, done research in the areas of gender, aesthetics, food, and film. For the last ten years, he has focused on “comparative cultures of sustainability” and cultural responses to sea level rise and catastrophic flooding. He is the director of Penn in Berlin and Rotterdam, an intensive summer program on water management and energy policy. His current project is called PolderGeist: On the Cultural Mobility of the Dutch Approach in the Netherlands, the United States and Indonesia. He is a member of One Resilient Semarang, an international team that won the Water as Leverage design competition and is now in the process of working with Bappeda and other stakeholders to create innovative solutions to the problems caused by subsidence. He started learning Bahasa Indonesia one year ago.

Stephanie O’Gara is a Fulbright Student Researcher and recent graduate of Columbia University with a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering. She is passionate about sustainable development, renewable energy, and fighting climate change. Last year, Stephanie conducted an agricultural waste assessment in Eastern Indonesia, founded a bioenergy club at her local university in Jakarta, and helped organize a Women’s March in Yogyakarta. Additionally, Stephanie has published research on laser manufacturing solar panels. She hopes to continue learning and researching in a PhD program next year.