From Mass to Public
Discourses and Representations of Popular Sovereignty in Indonesia
Research program: Culture and Representation
This project is an inquiry into the fall-out from the collapse of the New Order
in 1998. It is an inquiry into the politics of competing discourses and institutions vying with
each other to create and represent different ideas of the public in Indonesia—different
ideas of what it means to “be Indonesian” at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Based on primary research in Indonesia, this project aims to answer the question, “Can we
understand the events of the late 1990s in Indonesia as the beginnings of a break-up in the accretion
of representations, discourses and institutions of governmentality which, over time, under colonial
and national regimes, effectively suppressed the category of the public from Indonesian social,
cultural and political life?”
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