Abstract
Positionality is an important issue in the humanities and social sciences today. What is the relationship of the researcher to the topic she/he is discussing? From what position does she/he speak? To me personally as European living and working in Indonesia, this has always been challenging question. It has become even more complex and challenging since I converted to Islam. Only one essay in my newest book (2016) is explicitly about this, but basically the book is written from the perspective of someone in the process of crossing over (converting) and reflects on the ambivalence of this process.
Speaker
Katrin Bandel was born in 1972 in Wuppertal, Germany. She has been living in Yogyakarta since 2002, where she teaches at the Master Program for Religious and Cultural Studies at the Sanata Dharma University. She has published three books, the newest of which is Kajian Gender dalam Konteks Pascakolonial (2016).
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Yogyakarta telah lama menjadi rumah yang aman bagi berbagai tradisi, keyakinan, dan paham pemikiran yang beragam. Tetapi Daerah Istimewa ini belakangan disorot karena banyaknya aksi vigilantisme yang dilakukan sejumlah kelompok massa baik yang berlatar belakang agama atau politik. Aksi-aksi vigilantisme yang menyasar kelompok-kelompok sosial dan keagamaan minoritas menimbulkan pertanyaan apakah Yogyakarta, yang dikenal sebagai kota pendidikan dan pusat kebudayaan Jawa yang menekankan pada harmoni sosial, sudah berubah menjadi daerah yang intoleran? Laporan ini menunjukkan bahwa vigilantisme terhadap minoritas tidak cukup secara sederhana dipahami sebagai ekspresi konservatisme keagamaan dan intoleransi para pelaku terhadap minoritas, tetapi juga merupakan bagian dari proses perubahan sosial dan struktural yang diantaranya dipengaruhi oleh dinamika seputar status keistimewaan Yogyakarta. Tidak bisa dipungkiri, sektarianisme yang menguat belakangan ikut berpengaruh, tetapi seringkali kekerasan terhadap minoritas lebih tampak sebagai alat mobilisasi kelompok-kelompok kepentingan tertentu untuk mempertahankan basis sosial-politik yang menentukan kendali mereka atas ruang dan sumber daya.
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Judul: Krisis Keistimewaan: Kekerasan terhadap Minoritas di Yogyakarta
Penulis: Mohammad Iqbal Ahnaf & Hairus Salim
Penerbit: CRCS UGM
ISBN: 978-602-72686-7-8
Tebal: 134 halaman; 15×23 cm
Cetakan Pertama: April 2017
Harga: Rp60.000,00
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Narahubung untuk mendapatkan buku ini:
Divisi Marketing CRCS UGM
Gedung Lengkung Lantai 3
Sekolah Pascasarjana Lintas Disiplin Universitas Gadjah Mada
Jl. Teknika Utara, Pogung, Yogyakarta, Indonesia 55281
Telephone/Fax: 0274-544976
Atau melalui WA: 082141724150 (Bandri)
Lihat juga buku-buku publikasi CRCS yang lain di sini.

Abstract
The EU countries have been inefficiently managing the latest European migrant crisis, among them Poland was particularly unsuccessful. Contemporary discourse on refugees from the Middle East in Poland revolves around the following issues: the danger of altering Polish culture, the increase of the likelihood of terrorism, and the postulate of empathy towards people threatened by war. The religious factor plays a significant role in this discourse, since refugees who come from predominantly Muslim countries from a group of special interest in this Catholic-majority state. Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska, Adam Anczyk, and Anna M. Maćkowiak have examined, qualitatively, how Poles perceive Islam, and how this image may be associated with attitudes towards refugees. The aim of this study was to analyze narratives about Islam and the religious Other, emerging from partially structured interviews. The questionnaire, containing citations from the Bible, the Quran, and the Bhagavad Gita served as the trigger for interviews conducted after filling it out.
Speaker
Anna M. Maćkowiak is a doctoral student at the Department of Phenomenology and Anthropology of Religion, Institute for the Study of Religions, Jagiellonian University, Krakow. Currently she is beginning to realization of her individual research grant (Preludium) concerning constructing meanings of selected Indonesian religious rituals by hosts, tourists, and travellers. Her academic interests and activities pertain also to inter-religious relations, religious syncretism, and the influence of religions on daily life of Indonesian and Poles.
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Anthon Jason | CRCS | Wednesday Forum Report

In Indonesia, people can be called by their homeland’s name, such as orang Batak, orang Sunda, orang Manado and so on. The Indonesian concepts that are tied tightly to ideas of land, community, and cosmology referred to as adat have a dynamic and complex relationship to people’s religious identification and how they understand their identities. People can be emplaced or displaced in regard to how their religious identity relates to their cultural identification with particular places. While emplacement is the process by which people identify themselves with a place, displacement is a dislocation, removal, expropriation, takeover, or ideological process to refute claims of rights over land, the use of cultural symbols, or the ability of people and groups to self-identify.

Jonathan D Smith | CRCS | Essay

Indonesia is home to many environmental movements, either led by established environmental activists or by groups of indigenous people. The reclamation project in Benoa Bay, cement mining in Kendeng area, Central Java, and the Save Aru movement are just a few recent examples. Does religion play a role in these movements? Are these local movements related to the growing global environmental movement?
The local and global is a crucial element of environmental movements, because environmental problems defy boundaries. Our rapidly-changing climate poses an urgent challenge that is both global and local. As national governments slowly acknowledge their role in reducing carbon emissions (with some exceptions), local communities in Indonesia are living with the problems of rising temperatures and sea levels, increases in natural disasters, and increasing pollution of our air and water.
Local-global connections in religious environmental movements
In 2016 at the climate summit in Morocco, governments met to affirm their adoption of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. Signed by 111 countries (as of November 2016), the agreement commits to reducing carbon emissions and recognizes the human impact on climate change. At the same climate summit in Marrakech, hundreds of religious leaders and environmental activists launched the Interfaith Climate Statement.
The Interfaith Climate Statement included these words:

Abstract
One of the most significant ways the Indonesian state plays an active role in the country’s religious life is through education: Muslim students at all levels are required to take Islamic education classes, for which the government writes curricula and employs teachers. Therefore, the state—from the center at the Ministry of Religious Affairs to the periphery at individual teacher at public schools—has considerable power to shape religious perspectives of each new generation. His ongoing research is an ethnographic study of Islamic education in public high schools (Sekolah Menengah Atas Negeri) in the province of Yogyakarta, carried out through classroom observation, teacher interviews, and student focus groups. He will present the characteristics and effects of Islamic education in three fields: (a) perspective of religious diversity within Islam; (b) the valorization of the democratic nation-state as Islamic; and (c) the gender ideologies promoted as normatively Islamic. It is also noted how these phenomena vary in and among schools, noting the influence of socio-economic class, education, gender and religious background.
Speaker
Sawyer Martin French is research fellow at the Institute for International Studies at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at Universitas Gadjah Mada. He is currently conducting a yearlong research project on Islamic education in public high schools in Yogyakarta with the support of a grant in socio-cultural anthropology from the National Science Foundation.
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