Hanya ada Satu Kata: Lawan! On decolonising and building a mutual collaborative research practice on gender and climate change

Our title is borrowed from a famous line of Wiji Thukul’s poem Peringatan (translated as Warning), about the everyday lives of the working class and their struggles to be heard, resonating with many of our experiences in working to decolonise climate knowledge production. As in Thukul’s words: ‘There is only one word: Fight!’ We critically reflect on our recent experiences working with artists, communities, activists, and practitioners to better understand the gender–age–urban interface of climate change: how climate impacts are shaped by gender and age in urban Indonesia. In a deliberate challenge to problematic conventions of academic publishing, we choose to frame this paper around a series of creative processes focused on women’s experiences and responses to climate change, including Madihin – a Banjarese tradition of musical storytelling – and Trans Superhero Perubahan Iklim (Transgender Superheroes for Climate). We centre these different forms of knowledge and voice in our discussion as a series of provocations for researchers and practitioners to think creatively about the languages we use, the methods we draw on, the collaborations we build, how we disseminate ‘academic’ knowledge, and to push at institutional barriers and the boundaries of what ‘inclusion’ truly means at each stage of our research processes. We explore how feminist, ethnographic, and arts-led methodologies can foreground knowledge, perspectives, and art forms that are traditionally excluded in climate change knowledge production – long dominated by colonial and patriarchal hegemonies (and tyrannies) of science and ‘experts’; and unpack our un/learning in this imperfect ‘fight’ to decolonise our research process and build a mutual collaborative research practice

Halin ai: Intersectional Experiences of Disability, Climate Change, and Disasters in Indonesia

Halin ai centres the lived experiences of climate change and disasters of people living with disabilities in two urban sites in Indonesia—Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan and Mataram in West Nusa Tenggara. We call for an intersectional and decolonial approach to better understand how disabilities intersect with social and structural injustices in urban settings to shape diverse responses to climate change and disasters. We highlight the economic, socio‐cultural, and embodied challenges that increase vulnerability to—and ability to recover from—disasters including urban flooding and earthquakes. We draw on ethnographic and visual data from our research, including a comic illustrated by Ariel and Zaldi and sketches by Rizaldi, to centre diverse lived experiences of structural vulnerabilities and socio‐cultural marginalisation, particularly concerning education and livelihoods. Foregrounding life stories in this way serves to challenge the absence of meaningful engagement of people with disabilities in disaster risk reduction and climate change actions and decision‐making. Our article highlights disability as a site of both discrimination and critical embodied knowledge, simultaneously a product of structural, socio‐cultural, political, and environmental injustice while also a source of innovation, resilience, and agency

To veil or not to veil? Islamic dress and control over women’s public appearance

Women’s public appearance is subject to ongoing debates. In many parts of the world, women have been forced to cover their body, or to uncover it, due to incompatibility with local, cultural or religious values. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between August 2016 and February 2017 in Aceh, Indonesia; the only province with a special autonomous right to implement Islamic law. This paper aims to look at how Aceh’s shari’a regulates people’s public appearance. The research found that Aceh’s shari’a regulates women more than men and that the law has homogenized the interpretation of religious texts, which is monopolized by the government. The law endorses a unitary standard of women, into one standard model of femininity; particularly regarding their dress. Through the law, the government controls women’s bodies in public and imposes cultural uniformity onto them. This paper argues that the practice of Islamic law in Aceh disseminates a narrative of western hegemony through colonial legacies and stereotypes, in an Islamic culture that is male-dominated and in which women are subjugated