Membingkai Peristiwa, Menggali Imaji 

Hanny Nadhirah – 17 November 2023

Bagaimana sebuah foto dapat memiliki pengaruh besar dalam membentuk pemahaman kita tentang suatu peristiwa?

Foto atau gambar yang sering kita lihat rupanya bukanlah sesuatu yang netral. Di dalamnya mengandung konstruksi makna dan kepentingan tersembunyi. Sebagai sebuah visualisasi atas peristiwa, foto berpengaruh besar pada cara kita memahami, merasakan, dan mengambil tindakan terkait peristiwa tersebut. Fenomena inilah yang Elis Zulianti Anis,  dosen Universitas Ahmad Dahlan Yogyakarta, diskusikan pada Wednesday Forum (27/09) “Picturing Power: State Media, and Religious Representation in the 2015 Sumatra Forest Fires.” Elis memaparkan temuan penelitiannya terkait publikasi foto-foto media lokal saat kebakaran hutan dan lahan (karhutla) Sumatra tahun 2015.

Dialogue Moves: Practicing Research with Amerta Movement

Wednesday Forum – 30 August 2023

I have been undertaking a fellowship that investigates how Amerta Movement practice (developed by Javanese movement artist Suprapto Suryodarmo) supports dialogue between diverse ethnic and religious communities in Indonesia. This has been done in collaboration with Samsul Maarif (CRCS, UGM), Diane Butler (Dharma Nature Time), and artists who worked closely with Pak Prapto. Engaging with CRCS has prompted me to reconsider research methodologies from my own field of dance studies and their potential contribution to religious and cross-cultural studies. In particular, the area of practice research in performing arts explores how engagement in creative practice has the potential to develop new ways of knowing. I will share how my own bodily experience and creative responses have lent themselves towards new understandings of the research enquiry on dialogue through the Amerta Movement. Finally, I consider what practice research might offer a researcher engaging in dialogue across differences, inspired by Kershaw’s call for the ‘profound challenge to established modes of knowledge production in universities that the creative impulse in practice might, at its best, always produce’ (2009, 5).

Illness as Interreligious Encounter: A Study from Religiously-Affiliated Hospitals

Wednesday Forum – 12 April 2023

Everyone, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, and social status, is vulnerable to illness. Illness is a part of universal and inevitable of human fragility. One of main need of people who are ill, is a healthcare service which is generally provided by the hospital. Hence, illness is not only a complex medical and biological analyses that require objective evidence of malfunction at the microscopic level, but illness is also a social event. However, within hospital patients not only get healthcare service patients but that moment also potentially exposes them to greater diversity. Human encounter within hospital can be more challenging and interesting when the hospital is religiously affiliated hospital, because the religious conviction of the patient and the hospital are the basis for interreligious encounter. What kind of dynamics can occur in interreligious encounters within religiously affiliated hospitals? Can illness as human fragility and encounters within religiously affiliated hospitals strengthen interreligious relations?

Wednesday Forum, 06 October 2021. Speaker: Yanwar Pribadi, UIN Sultan Maulana Hasanuddin Banten

Monoteisme sering dianggap sebagai puncak dari pengalaman keagamaan manusia. Tak heran, dalam studi antropologi agama, monoteisme sering disandingkan dengan gerak evolusi peradaban manusia. Karenanya, keberadaaan temuan monoteisme pada masyarakat purba menjadi antitesis dalam teori evolusi agama. Akan tetapi, ada yang alpa dalam hiruk-pikuk perdebatan tersebut.

Sejak dua dekade terakhir, perjuangan dan pertarungan umat Baha'i melawan stigma kian tampak: mulai dari upaya mendapatkan hak-hak administrasi yang memadai hingga menegaskan eksistensi mereka sebagai agama independen, bukan aliran sempalan dari agama tertentu.