Decolonizing Anthropology Beyond the Neoliberal University
Convener: Aryo Danusiri
Co-convener: Elan Lazuardi
This panel aims to reflect, through the concrete pedagogical experiences of its panelists, on what it means to decolonize anthropology in Indonesia amid the neoliberal transformation of universities. It further asks how decolonizing anthropology in Indonesia becomes a form of future-making within a rapidly multipolarizing world. As shifting global power centers reshape academic governance through audit cultures, rankings, accreditation regimes, industrial-oriented education, and the dominance of English-language publication, Indonesian universities and academics navigate multiple, often competing, models of knowledge authority. We examine how such pressures materialize in everyday pedagogical encounters and reshape knowledge, authority, and theory-making.
Rather than treating decolonization as curricular diversification, this panel’s goal is to interrogate how anthropological categories, canonical texts, and methodological training reproduce colonial and managerial logics. By foregrounding community-engaged, field-based, and collaborative pedagogies, we challenge the modern assumption that the classroom remains confined to the university and explore how classrooms become sites for cultivating pluriversal ways of knowing rooted in Indonesia’s diverse social worlds.
This panel also centers on gender as a structural analytic and intersectionality as a method, as contributors explore how ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality, and locality shape pedagogical relations and intellectual hierarchies. This also includes the translational labor required of Indonesian anthropologists, who must navigate English-language canons, Indonesian scholarship, and local languages in their classrooms. Translation, thus, becomes epistemic work.
Anthropological training also includes instruction in teaching methods and research ethics. In a discipline shaped by colonial and nationalist histories that have often obscured questions of power, positionality, and accountability, research ethics and methodology training can become sites of decolonial practice. This kind of teaching shifts anthropology away from extractive practices and toward relational responsibility.
By situating teaching in plural forms as a primary site of disciplinary transformation, the panel reimagines anthropology’s theoretical and institutional futures within, against, and beyond the neoliberal university. We invite contributors to ask how decolonial pedagogies can foster multiple futures that challenge dominant technocratic and developmentalist frameworks in a multipolar world.
Relevant topics include but are not limited to the following:
-Applying feminist pedagogy and a feminist anthropological approach in facilitating the learning of gender, intersectionality, and livelihood.
-Rethinking “history” in teaching the history of anthropological theory
-Language, Gender, and Authority in the Classroom
-Platform Capitalism and the Digital Classroom
-Decolonizing the Teaching of Race and Human Variation
-Teaching anthropology as translational work across different languages and bilingual pedagogy
-Teaching ethics and methods in a discipline shaped by colonial legacies and nationalist projects/developmentalism
-Immersive, community-based methods in Indonesian anthropological training and their implications for anthropology’s social role