Tag: Semarang

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PhD Defence of Hotmauli (Oely) Sidabalok

We are very proud to report that on Wednesday, February 8, 2023, Hotmauli (Oely) Sidabalok successfully defended her PhD thesis on “Residential Solid Waste Management in Semarang: The question of geographical environmental justice” (co-supervised by Dr Martin van der Velde and Dr Ton van Naerssen). In the fast-growing cities of Indonesia waste disposal is a serious and growing problem. Recycling is still not mainstream in most cases, and dumping solid waste at temporary or final disposal sites causes many negative impacts on the people living in the direct vicinity. These impacts vary substantially between different groups, circumstances and places and cause severe environmental justice problems. Oely has not just been investigating these issues and teaching about them at the Universitas Katolik Soegijapranata (Unika) of Semarang, in Indonesia, but also has been engaged as a (political) activist on behalf of the affected people, and has supported the local communities in organising and mobilising a broader social movement to address and solve these problems, while also taking care of her family. In between, she occasionally had to pause her research work. It, therefore, is amazing with how much perseverance she slowly but surely managed to finish her research work after almost 20 years and managed to come up with highly relevant insights into how to deal with this urging problem. An important contribution to making our places more sustainable while at the same time also an important contribution to the long-lasting partnership between the UNIKA University of Semarang and the Radboud University in Nijmegen. It is also a nice example of how more general theoretical insights in concepts of ‘spatial justice’ and ‘new social movements’ as they are developed and applied within our geography group in many fields of application, form the intellectual glue between these different fields of application in the extremely broad terrain of geographical research and feed into the continuous conversations among us (and others). In that sense, this thesis also contributes to the local ‘placemaking’ within our geography group at Radboud University.

You can download the full text of her very well-written thesis by clicking on the cover of her PhD Thesis.

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Civil Society Governance

The division between Government, Markets and Civil Society is increasingly blurring, like many other things in society seem to get blurred. At least from the perspective of Science, they are increasingly addressed as complex phenomena, which can not easily be reduced to one single principle, one single actor, or one single perspective. The world cannot easily be categorised or containerised anymore. More and more we become aware that the phenomena in our society are actually a contingent and contextual interplay of many different actors and forces. For Geographers the contextuality and place-specificness of these complex phenomena and developments are a fascinating object of research and of Place Making. This also changes the theoretical and conceptual frameworks we apply while investigating these phenomena and developments. Relational approaches like Practice Theories, Actor-Network Theories, Assemblage Theories and Complexity Theories are very much en vogue, addressing the relationships between the heterodox factors, conditions, intentions, and materialities, involved.

Today, Dr Benny D. Setianto, successfully defended his PhD Thesis on “Civil Society Governance”. This term in the first instance might sound paradoxical, because isn’t “Government” the opposite of “Civil Society”? Well, in the face of the above referred to developments in society as well as in the way we tend to conceptualise society, it comes not as a surprise. The traditional, rather containerised, concept of Government is described by Benny Setianto as “Government by Design” and contrasted to the role of Civil Society in this same field of government actions, as “Government by Accident”, or maybe one should say “bottom-up government”, “emergent governance”, or “government by coincidence” or even as the “government by the spontaneous coming together of different forces, actors, intentions and circumstances”. Benny Sentianto critically describes this interplay between Government and Civil Society in the shaping of Semarang Environmental Governance, and how this historically came about, and thus he also contributed to the reconceptualisation of the above-mentioned complexities in today’s society.

His PhD Thesis was supervised by Prof. Huib Ernste, Prof. Bas Arts and Dr Ton van Naerssen and is another result of the close cooperation between Unika Soegijapranata Catholic University in Semarang Indonesia and our Geography Department at the Radboud University, and there will be more to come…