STS School

Call for participants is now open!

STUDYING INDONESIAN INFRASTRUCTURE

An STS School

BACKGROUND

Indonesia’s rapidly evolving infrastructure landscape—marked by ambitious projects, ecological challenges, and uneven access—calls for an interdisciplinary, if not transdisciplinary, approach. Although the design and construction of infrastructures involve knowledge drawn from engineering, natural sciences, and the social sciences, scholarly engagement with them often remains fragmented and siloed. For example, anthropologists studying infrastructures do so separately from historians and sociologists. There is therefore a pressing need for collaborative intellectual spaces where researchers can critically examine how infrastructure intertwines with questions of power, governance, and environmental justice.

In recent years, Perkumpulan Peneliti Eutenika has taken important steps to foster a growing community of scholars and practitioners concerned with the relationships between science, technology, and society in Indonesia. By bridging disciplinary divides, Eutenika has created a platform for approaching infrastructures not merely as a technical domain, but as a set of cultural and political processes that shape everyday life.

At the same time, the Department of Sociology at Universitas Brawijaya has spearheaded the introduction of new undergraduate curricula through elective courses, such as Sains, Teknologi, dan Masyarakat (Science, Technology, and Society) and Teknologi Infrastruktur dan Masyarakat Berkelanjutan (Infrastructure Technology & Sustainable Community). Targeted at second- and third-year students, such an effort reflects a strong commitment to fostering transdisciplinary scholarship within the social sciences and humanities landscape in Indonesia. By situating material artifacts at the center of inquiry, the Department seeks to provide an alternative to traditional frameworks by promoting socio-technical dimensions that have historically influenced the development of sociological discourse.

Building on this foundation, the present initiative seeks to create a new infrastructure in its own right, one that strengthens connections within the emerging STS (Science, Technology, and Society) community across Indonesia’s academic and professional landscape. Through this effort, the program aims to cultivate sustained interdisciplinary dialogue, collaborative research, and critical engagement with infrastructure as a key site of social transformation.

This STS School is a joint venture of Perkumpulan Peneliti Eutenika with the Doctoral Program of Sociology, Universitas Brawijaya and the Centre Population et Développement, French Institute for Research on Development.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY "INFRASTRUCTURE"?

From a classical Marxist perspective, infrastructure (often referred to as the “base”) constitutes the material foundation of a society’s economy. It is composed of two key elements: the power of production (such as labor, tools, materials) and the relations of production (the social organization through which production takes place). Together, these elements shape what Marx described as the superstructure, including legal systems, political institutions, ideologies, and cultural norms. In this view, material conditions play a fundamental role in shaping the social and the mental.

However, this relationship is not unidirectional. Rather than a simple determination from base to superstructure, the relationship is better understood as reciprocal and dynamic. While infrastructures provide the material grounding of social life, superstructures (such as legal and political systems) also influence and reshape infrastructures. For instance, modern legal frameworks have been instrumental in stabilizing and protecting property rights, which are core to capitalist modes of production. As a result, the boundaries between infrastructure and superstructure are often blurred. Contemporary technologies, such as smartphones, illustrate this overlap clearly: they function both as tools of production and as mediators of social relations, shaping how individuals communicate, think, and interact. In this sense, the base-superstructure model remains a useful heuristic for understanding class relations and ongoing processes of social transformation.

Building on and moving beyond this classical framework, this STS School adopts an approach inspired by anthropologist Brian Larkin (2013), who defines infrastructure as:

“built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space. As physical forms they shape the nature of a network, the speed and direction of its movement, its temporalities, and its vulnerability to breakdown. They comprise the architecture for circulation, literally providing the undergirding of modern societies, and they generate the ambient environment of everyday life.”

Following this perspective, infrastructure is understood not only as a collection of material objects, but as a set of relational systems that organize circulation, connectivity, and everyday life. Indonesian STS scholar Merlyna Lim (2018) highlights that “the study of infrastructure allows technology and its associated emergent roles to be visible.” This insight is particularly important because infrastructures are often conceived as systems that are buried underground or recede into a naturalized and seemingly unremarkable background. As such, infrastructure studies play a crucial role in bringing these systems into analytical focus because infrastructures are simultaneously visible and invisible. While they form the underlying conditions that enable other systems to function, they often remain unnoticed until moments of failure or disruption—of which Larkin (2013) would disagree with.

This School therefore aims to render infrastructure visible, to unpack their layered materiality, examine their interconnections, and analyze how they sustain, structure, and sometimes disrupt social life. By doing so, it seeks to develop a deeper understanding of infrastructure as a crucial site where technology, power, and everyday life intersect.

STUDYING INDONESIAN INFRASTRUCTURE

Critical scholarship on infrastructure in Indonesia remains relatively limited. Among the existing works, a few key contributions stand out. Sulfikar Amir’s The Technological State in Indonesia (2013) examines the rise and eventual failure of the national aircraft industry, while Anto Mohsin’s Electrifying Indonesia (2023) explores electricity as both a marker of modernity and a vehicle for social justice. In addition, Merlyna Lim’s body of work on the Internet as infrastructure has been instrumental in demonstrating how digital systems actively shape social and political life in Indonesia. Notably, these Indonesian scholars now hold prominent positions in leading universities abroad, reflecting both the global relevance of their work and the limited institutional consolidation of STS scholarship within Indonesia itself.

Alongside these contributions, a number of international scholars have also enriched discussions on science, technology, and infrastructure in Indonesia. Works such as Rudolf Mrázek’s Engineers of Happy Land (2002; Perkembangan Teknologi dan Nasionalisme di Sebuah Koloni, 2006), Andrew Goss’s The Floracrat (2011; Belenggu Ilmuwan dan Pengetahuan, 2014), Jamie Davidson’s Governing the Roads (2015; Menaja Jalan, 2019), Hans Pols’s Nurturing Indonesia (2018; Merawat Bangsa, 2019), or Elizabeth Dexler’s Infrastructure of Impunity (2023; Infrastruktur Impunitas, 2025)—which all have been translated into Indonesian, while above-mentioned works of Indonesian scholars remain in English—provide important historical and cultural perspectives on the role of science and technology in shaping the Indonesian nation. Together, these studies offer valuable entry points, yet a systematic and sustained critical engagement with infrastructure as a socio-technical and political domain remains underdeveloped.

In Indonesian public discourse, the term “infrastruktur” has gained increasing prominence, particularly during the presidency of Joko Widodo (2014-2024), whose administration strongly emphasized accelerated development through large-scale infrastructure projects. Central to this agenda is the framing of infrastructure as the backbone of national development, regional growth, and industrial modernization, exemplified by programs such as the Proyek Strategis Nasional (PSN, National Strategic Projects).

Infrastructures encompass both visible and less visible systems. Recent studies in the Asian context confirms this idea of an expanded definition of infrastructures. Infrastructures are not only highly visible projects (such as dams, ports, highways, airports, railways, new capital), but also less visible systems (including, education, healthcare, and social welfare). In practice, however, infrastructure is both a material and symbolic marker of state progress. The inauguration of infrastructure projects becomes a performative act that reinforces political legitimacy, both for state actors and for local communities.

Underlying these processes is a powerful “promise of infrastructure”: an imagination of progress and modernity. Yet, this imagined materiality rarely emerges from local conditions, especially in an archipelagic context such as Indonesia. Instead, models of infrastructure associated with progress are frequently imported or inspired by external standards, while locally grounded practices are often marginalized as backward or obstructive. Consequently, infrastructure is sometimes experienced as an external imposition: an “alien” presence that may simultaneously promise development and produce new forms of exclusion. This ambivalence reflects a broader postcolonial condition shared by many formerly colonized societies, in which science and technology are viewed as both vehicles of advancement and sources of domination. Embedded within unequal global power relations, infrastructure development can reinforce hierarchical notions of progress and encourage technocratic and, at times, authoritarian modes of governance.

Throughout this School, we aim to situate the imagination, construction, use, and even destruction of infrastructure within an STS perspective. We invite scholars from diverse backgrounds and regions to critically unpack the multiple layers that constitute infrastructure—as a foundation of social life, a site of political contestation, and a mechanism that can either advance social justice or deepen existing inequalities.

THE SCHOOL

The School is designed for postgraduate students (master's and doctoral) as a one-week on-site short course in Malang once a year for three years, with each year focusing on a specific thematic cluster. The first batch will commence in February 2027, with the next interactions planned to happen in 2028 and 2029. Participants may apply to attend a given year, while the overall structure ensures conceptual continuity across the full program.

Year 1: Politics and Governance of Infrastructure. Explore how infrastructure shapes access, inequality, and decision-making processes across society. [Call for Participants is now open!]
Year 2: Infrastructure Temporalities and Maintenance. Examine the life cycles of infrastructure—from construction to breakdown—and what they reveal about development, delay, and neglect.
Year 3: People as Infrastructure. Rethink infrastructure through everyday practices, highlighting how communities create informal systems that sustain social and economic life.

Each edition of the School combines two days of field visits with four days of classroom-based activities, including lectures, seminars, and hands-on workshops. This integrated format allows participants to connect conceptual discussions with real-world observations. Participants will be encouraged to link their own research to the yearly themes, engage across disciplines, and develop new perspectives on infrastructure as both a technical system and a social phenomenon.

Although English is the primary language for classroom instruction, certain field visits informants may communicate exclusively in Bahasa Indonesia. Non-professional translation services will be available for participants who are not proficient in the local language. Consequently, a foundational understanding of Bahasa Indonesia is recommended to better comprehend the content and cultural nuances of the information presented by local informants.

The School is an opportunity to join a growing community of researchers and practitioners working on Science, Technology, and Society (STS) in Indonesia and beyond.