Yale Conference on Indonesia
Ways of Water: Drains, Viscosities, Leaks, Overflows, and Bursts in Indonesia
invited scholars, scholar-artists, activists, policymakers, and other interested parties to consider questions germane to Indonesia through the lens of water.
On Saturday, April 18, students, scholars, and local enthusiasts gathered at Yale University to explore politics, ecology, history, and more in the 2026 Yale Conference on Indonesia. This was the conference’s first in-person iteration since 2019.
In panels moderated by enthusiastic Yale undergraduates, presenters spoke on:
- What Water Knows: Indigenous Cosmologies, Colonial Dispossession, and the Onto-Epistemological Refusal in East Nusa Tenggara (Nathanael Pribady, Columbia Teachers College)
- Green Energy Lands in Hot Water: Energy Transition and Vertical Hydropolitics in Eastern Indonesia (Timothy Ravis, Cornell Department of Global Development)
- When Water Refuses to Recede: Flooding, Healthcare Access, and Uneven Survival in Coastal Jakarta (Clarisza Runtung, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
- Accumulation by Excavation: Climate Change, Debt and Repair in the Mahakam Delta (Tamar Law, Cornell Department of Global Development)
- Susur Sungai (Izza Alyssa, Yale School of Art)
The conference proved truly interdisciplinary, with participants ranging from municipal financial data analysts to MFA students to undergraduates studying Education Studies. Each panel was followed by vibrant discussion between audience and speakers, the conversational ebb and flow made more complex by the range of expertises present.
Guest speaker Dr. Michelle Kooy of the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education opened with a provocation encouraging the audience to learn from water as a teacher.
In her talk, she took a holistic but relatively positive view of water, characterizing it as “dependable” and “playful” alongside its “destructive” potential.
Meanwhile, research presentations discussed the lessons Indonesians are learning from water, highlighting the anxieties that water implies in a rapidly developing archipelago.
Presenters spoke about water as a site of conflict between tradition and modernity, and as a separator of class and privilege. In a presentation of a different mode, Izza Alyssa’s audio installation Susur Sungai interpreted water as a metaphor for political exile.
At the conclusion of the conference, participants expressed gratitude for the intellectually intimate “safe space” the gathering had become, an honest forum to speak candidly about topics considered taboo in Indonesia. It was remarked that the day had felt perfectly curated, from the presentations to the guest speaker, to the locally catered food, to the midmorning break taken for qigong. One attendee noted that even the cresting wave motif that encircled the ceiling of LC 101 felt unintentionally on theme. Over chai and lemper, presenters and attendees reflected on questions provoked and unresolved. Many left Linsly-Chittenden Hall freshly inspired, new friends and thought partners accompanied by brewing ideas.
The 2026 Yale Conference on Indonesia was organized by Dr. Dinny Aletheiani of the Yale Macmillan Center, with the help of a planning committee of graduate and undergraduate Yale students, who coordinated logistics, moderated panels, and emceed the event. The conference was generously supported by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies under the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies at Yale.
Written by Biruni Hariadi, Yale College Class of 2027