Please come by the ICOC 2025 Registration and Information desk to collect your name badge.
Location: Superfloor, Mezzanine Level (Melbourne Connect, 700 Swanston Street, Carlton) - outside Forum 1
The cafe and coffee cart will also be available for teas and coffees (Note: only electronic or card payments accepted)
For wifi, join network name MelbConnectGuest (no password needed)
To keep ICOC free and open to all, this conference is not catered.  Participants are responsible for purchasing their own food and drinks.
Link for prayer room/mosque locations

Chair: Nicole Tse

The Beyond Borders roundtable panel brings together five conservation scholars from Australia and Indonesia to critically explore how collection care for Indonesian material culture intersects with cross-cultural practices, global pedagogies, and culturally embedded research.

Speakers will share experiences working with Indonesian cultural material across diverse public and private collections in Victoria, and learning in Indonesia, including: a large-scale private collection of contemporary mixed media works in regional Victoria; a state-owned collection of Southeast Asian manuscripts, an institutional research collection of wayang kulit and cross-cultural studies in Indonesia.

Chair: Jeremy Kingsley

Chair: Tess Toumbourou

Chair: Amalinda Savirani

Chair: Kacung Marijan

This panel will present our studies on the development and dynamic of important aspects of today's politics in Indonesia. We look more specifically at four areas: the impact of political leadership on democratisation, electoral competition and strategies, ecological conservation issues and democratic innovations. By exploring this nexus, we can understand the multitude of democratic regression problems in the country, which mainly happened during the decade of President Joko Widodo's administration. In addition, it is worthwhile to think of what approaches are feasible to cope with the consequences of declining democracy and governance and rebuild Indonesian democracy under the new government of Prabowo Subianto. Our panel is as follows. 

Chair: Sarah Dong

Indonesia’s sustained economic growth over the past decades has reshaped its social, economic, and cultural landscape, with rising living standards, expanding education, a growing middle class, and urbanization. This panel examines the gendered implications of these developments, focusing on how they influence education, labour market participation, marriage, fertility, and social mobility. The first paper explores the relationship between the rise of the middle class and educational and labour outcomes. The second paper investigates urban sprawl in Greater Jakarta, analysing gendered dynamics in commuting and labour market participation. The third paper highlights the role of babysitters in the care economy, addressing gender, class, and rural-urban disparities. The panel concludes with a comparative analysis of the legislative processes behind two gender-related bills in Indonesia: the anti-sexual violence bill and the domestic worker protection bill. This panel offers insights into the cultural, social, and legal transformations shaping contemporary Indonesia from a gender-inclusive perspective.

Note this event is not located at Melbourne Connect.
Location: Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room level 1 of the Sidney Myer Asia Centre.

Join Prof. Jennifer Balint (University of Melbourne) and Prof Wawan Mas’udi (Universitas Gadjah Mada) for the Australia-Indonesia in Conversation Opening event.

The Australia-Indonesia in Conversation (AIC) 2025 brings together various stakeholders to examine critical issues at the intersection of indigenous representation, economic development, and knowledge production in Australia and Indonesia. Both countries have rich histories of indigenous communities navigating complex relationships with state policies, economic development initiatives, and knowledge systems. Despite differences in governance structures and legal frameworks, indigenous groups in both nations face similar challenges in asserting their rights, protecting their lands, and ensuring their voices are heard in decision-making processes. By discussing and learning from these experiences, AIC 2025 aims to foster a comparative dialogue that highlights best practices, shared struggles, and potential pathways for more equitable and sustainable engagements with indigenous communities. The conference highlights the importance of Indigenous agency, collaborative research, and ethical engagement in addressing pressing social, political, and economic challenges.

To keep ICOC free and open to all, this conference is not catered. Participants are responsible for purchasing their own food and drinks. A coffee cart will be available at Melbourne Connect for coffee purchases.

Note this event is not located at Melbourne Connect.
Location: Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room level 1 of the Sidney Myer Asia Centre.

There is increasing academic literature on the nexus between development and indigenous representation. Literature shows that the relationship between indigenous people and development is complex and multifaceted, which often involves competing interests in economic growth, environmental conservation, and human rights. Asymmetric power between indigenous people and developmental actors (such as state and private sector) provides the structural obstacle for indigenous people to participate in the development design. They often experience the high-level disadvantages of development such as loss of their land rights, economic marginalisation, cultural erosion, and limited source of life due to environmental degradation. Therefore, currently, global movement requires meaningful participation to secure indigenous people's representation in the governance of development.

*Note venue change

Chair: Shuri Mariasih Gietty

This panel focuses on environmental sustainability and community resilience in Indonesia, particularly on local knowledge, grassroots movements, and collective action. The four presenters collectively examine how through common initiatives in the physical and digital space, communities respond to environmental and social challenges. By looking into Indonesian environmental documentaries, communities in the islands of Ambon and Haruku, the Indonesian Peasants Union and the Batin Sembilan indigenous community in Jambi and Jakarta’s urban middle-class, particularly housewives' initiatives like Trash Bank, the presentations in the panel highlight the various ways Indonesian communities respond to environmental challenges, emphasizing on resilience and solidarity. 

Chair: Nicole Tse

Chair: Tess Tombourou

Chair: Helen Pausacker

Chair: Linda Bennett

One of the key responsibilities of a modern nation state is to protect and promote the health and wellbeing of its citizens. The papers presented in this double panel engage with ongoing health transformations and the extent to which health equity is and can be achieved within a country with extraordinary geographical, cultural and economic diversity. This theme is timely because it is now a decade since the introduction of Jaminan Kesehaten Indonesian (JKN), which represented a legion investment towards achieving equity in access to universal health care for Indonesians. The panel papers consider how a range of populations and actors are still experiencing health inequities and how these disparities are intrinsically linked with other forms of social and economic inequity, as well as exploring differences in the accessibility of health services for marginalised populations. The presenters in this panel also examine how policy guiding health transitions moving forward needs to be explicitly engaged with improving health equity and provide insights into how this can be achieved in different locations and at different scales from national, provincial and community level perspectives.

Chair: Jeremy Kingsley

To keep ICOC free and open to all, this conference is not catered.  Participants are responsible for purchasing their own food and drinks.

Note: Melbourne Connect does not permit outside food or drink except those purchased from their cafe, coffee cart or food stand on the superfloor (mezzanine level)

Some ICOC lunch specials can be pre-ordered from The Atlantic Group:
Pre-order via this link https://qr.meandu.app/afl3vnz or purchase at the counter (subject to availability)
- Nasi goreng with satay chicken skewers ($14)
- Spicy tofu stir-fried noodles with vegetables | VEGAN ($14)

Please ensure you are back in time 10 minutes before the start of the next session

Note this event is not located at Melbourne Connect.
Location: Room G07 on ground floor of the Sidney Myer Asia Centre.
** note room change**

The Indonesia Council cordially invites members to attend the 2025 Annual General Meeting. If you do not have an active membership for the Indonesia Council but wish to attend the AGM, you are invited to sign up here.

The Annual General Meeting will provide an opportunity to review the Council’s activities and achievements over the past year, discuss strategic directions, and address any formal business in accordance with the Council’s constitution. 

Further details, including the meeting agenda, Zoom access details, and RSVP information, will be circulated directly to financial members of the Indonesia Council via email.

*Note new location*
Note this event is not located at Melbourne Connect

Please join Professor Kate McGregor to launch the newly published book The Routledge Handbook of Human Rights in Southeast Asia (2025) co-edited by Professor Amalinda Savirani and Dr Ken Setiawan.

The handbook analyses some of the region’s most pressing human rights issues, while also giving attention to those actors and institutions that work towards improvement.
Click here to order or view the table of contents

Chapters by international experts in the field provide readers with a background on some of Southeast Asia’s most pressing human rights concerns. The book builds on, and contributes to, existing analyses of human rights in Southeast Asia to further enhance our understanding of what sits behind the region’s ambivalent human rights track record. Following an introduction, the handbook is structured in eight parts. The chapters cover a wide range of human rights issues including human rights debates at political and regional levels, and how human rights are experienced every day, such as the rights to food, water, and work:

The handbook considers the political and social contexts in which human rights emerge, the dynamics of their contestation and violation, and how rights are claimed. It demonstrates that human rights are a practice and goes beyond considering human rights as formal structures in laws, regulations, and meeting rooms. A timely overview and analysis of the situation of Human Rights in Southeast Asia, this handbook will be a valuable reference work for scholars and practitioners in human rights, the field of Asian Law, Asian Studies in general and Southeast Asian Studies in particular.

Click here to order or view the table of contents

About the editors:

Note this event is not located at Melbourne Connect.
Location: Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room level 1 of the Sidney Myer Asia Centre.

Indigenous knowledge research is an emerging field with immense potential to address domestic and regional challenges across Indonesia. Indigenous knowledge research typically addresses issues of environmental sustainability and cultural diversity through localised knowledge traditions practiced across generations. Yet Indigenous knowledge research is also thoroughly interdisciplinary and builds global connections between diverse peoples and places. This is exemplified by collaborative research projects connecting academics and Indigenous communities in Australia and Indonesia. By profiling several research projects that sustain relationships between Australia and Indonesia, the roundtable will explore the significance of Indigenous knowledge research within various cultural, social and political settings. We ask how Indigenous knowledge research might inform local and regional challenges, and explore applied methodologies that can enhance research across a range of disciplines and contexts. 

Chair: Mia Dunphy 

Chair: Kate McGregor

This panel brings together a range of perspectives to consider several different examples of decolonial museum interventions. We define decolonial museum interventions as efforts by persons outside the formal context of museums to disrupt museum narratives and collections in critical ways that take up the legacies of coloniality. Our case studies include an exhibition on the colonial era plantation workers exhibited at Van Abbemuseum (Netherlands) analysed by Eclair and a new anti-colonial museum in Indonesia called the Multatuli Museum analysed by McGregor and an exhibition on the contested colonial plaster casts from Nias exhibited at the Museum Pusaka Nias, Indonesia analysed by the curator Boonstra. The final case study reflects on artistic intervention drawing on decolonial and local knowledge to contest colonial knowledge production including a piece created by Albaquni that has been exhibited in different contexts analysed by the artist.

Chair: Annisa Beta

This organised panel explores the state of knowledge work in neoliberalising Indonesia using a feminist lens. Indonesia has an increasingly vibrant knowledge economy where universities are gradually geared to produce marketable education and research services efficiently, causing rising precarity and casualisation, especially among early careers and women academics. The panelists unpack the contradictions within the neoliberal reorganisation of universities, encouraging a critical discussion on ‘academics as neoliberal subjects’ who could articulate grievances about the nature of knowledge work by shaping a collective academic will based on everyday practices and engaged theoretical understanding of the social and cultural world. 

Chair: Lis Kramer

Chair: Tiara Marthias

One of the key responsibilities of a modern nation state is to protect and promote the health and wellbeing of its citizens. The papers presented in this double panel engage with ongoing health transformations and the extent to which health equity is and can be achieved within a country with extraordinary geographical, cultural and economic diversity. This theme is timely because it is now a decade since the introduction of Jaminan Kesehaten Indonesian (JKN), which represented a legion investment towards achieving equity in access to universal health care for Indonesians. The panel papers consider how a range of populations and actors are still experiencing health inequities and how these disparities are intrinsically linked with other forms of social and economic inequity, as well as exploring differences in the accessibility of health services for marginalised populations. The presenters in this panel also examine how policy guiding health transitions moving forward needs to be explicitly engaged with improving health equity and provide insights into how this can be achieved in different locations and at different scales from national, provincial and community level perspectives.

Chair: Ariane Utomo

Note this event is not located at Melbourne Connect.
Location: Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room level 1 of the Sidney Myer Asia Centre.

This break is the conclusion of ICOC Day 3 for paper presentations.
During this break there is an optional guided tour of the Potter Museum of Art.
Following this break, you are invited to join the Arief Budiman Lecture.

This event and exhibition access is FREE.
Location: The Potter Museum of Art Map link
Corner Swanston Street and Masson Road
The University of Melbourne, Parkville Campus

About the exhibition
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art celebrates the brilliance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art while confronting the dark heart of Australia’s colonial history and proclaims the importance of Indigenous knowledge and agency. The exhibition features more than 400 works, including rarely-seen artworks and cultural objects from the University of Melbourne’s collections, 193 important loans from 77 private and public lenders and six new commissions.

Note this event is not located at Melbourne Connect.
Location: Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room level 1 of the Sidney Myer Asia Centre.

Speaker: leading film maker Dandhy Dwi Laksono
Challenges to Indonesian Democracy: Autocracy Strengthens, Journalism and Film Influence Fades?

Dandhy Laksono will talk about his experiences as a film director and co-founder of the documentary production house Watchdoc.  Laksono will speak about how two Watchdoc films (Dirty Vote and Sexy Killers) are examples how it is increasingly difficult as a filmmaker to engage in long-term reporting and investigative journalism in the public interest. 

About Dandhy Laksono:
Dandhy Laksono is an award-winning Indonesian activist, investigative journalist, and filmmaker. He previously worked with Indonesian and foreign news channels: Acehkita.com, Liputan 6 of SCTV, RCTI, and ABC Radio. In 2009, he co-founded the documentary production studio WatchDoc which promotes social change in Indonesia through videos and digital media. Watchdoc has produced more than 400 documentary episodes, 1000 television features, and at least 100 commercial videos & works on topics such as corruption, democratic transition, environmental issues, and human rights. In 2021, Watchdoc received the Gwangju Prize for Human Rights Award and the Ramon Magsaysay Award for the Emergent Leadership for its activism. Upon receiving the Ramon Magsaysay Award, Watchdoc was praised for its “highly principled crusade for an independent media organization, its energetic use of investigative journalism, documentary filmmaking, and digital technology in its effort to transform Indonesia’s media landscape, and its commitment to a vision of the people themselves as makers of media and shapers of their own world.”

About the Arief Budiman Lecture:

The Arief Budiman Public Lecture is held in honour of scholar, activist and public intellectual Arief Budiman (1941-2020), who was Foundation Professor of Indonesian at the University of Melbourne from 1997 to 2008. The Arief Budiman Lecture is supported by the Asian Studies Trust Fund, The University of Melbourne. Inaugurated in 2021, the annual Arief Budiman Lecture is held by the Indonesian Studies Program at the Asia Institute.