Agus Suwignyo – Decolonizing Catholicism in Indonesia: Environmental Education as a Local Movement, 1950–1990s

This presentation will examine the environmental discourses and activism of the Indonesian Catholic community from the 1950s to 1990s. The community’s interest in environmental issues ranged from the impact of wild animal hunting and disasters such as floods and landslides, to the threats that arose from industrialisation and the effects of deforestation, industrial land use, and household waste. Finally, this presentation will propose that Indonesian Catholics’ involvement in environmental concerns was an emergent form of “Indonesianization,” situated in the realities of Indonesia.

Agus Suwignyo is a Professor in the History of Education in the History Department, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He received his doctorate degree from Leiden University in the Netherlands in 2012, and completed post-doctoral projects in Kyoto University (Japan, 2014), Freiburg University (Germany, 2014-15), the University of Agder (Norway, 2016), and the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands, 2019-22). His research interests include social and education history focusing on knowledge production, decolonisation, citizenship and state formation. His recent publications include “Higher Education as an Instrument of Decolonisation: The Community Service Programme in Indonesia 1950–1969,” Asian Studies Review 48(3), 2024, 447–466.

Simone Gigliotti is a Reader in Holocaust Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. While she publishes mainly in the field of Holocaust studies, she maintains active interests in the history and geography of comparative genocide. She is especially interested in the survival and regeneration of indigenous communities amid industrialisation, the environmental and socio-economic impacts of climate change, and resource plunder.