Serang District Head Elections, 2015 (personal collection)

Electoral Participation and Performance of Agrarian Movements in Indonesia
I am creating an original dataset of various types of electoral participation of 192 agrarian movement organizations in Indonesia (peasant unions, NGOs, and civil society networks) and their performance. This dataset will help us in analyzing the potentials and limits of electoral intervention by Indonesian rural civil society.

Data gathering for this dataset was assisted by Ika Wahyuni and received the Grants-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows Funding (Project No. 19F19016).

Social Origins of Indonesian Executive Heads of Local Governments
We created an original dataset of winning candidates’ CVs in the 2005 and 2010 direct elections for district heads and mayors (pilkada) in 222 districts (kabupaten) and municipalities (kota) in Indonesia and analyze its turnover pattern. We plan to extend our analysis to the 2015 pilkada cycle. Parts of this project has been published in Regional and Federal Studies.

This is a collaborative project with Dr. Michael Buehler from SOAS, University of London and Dr. Ronnie Nataatmadja from Harper College.

A Life History of a Rural Educator
This is a collaborative life history project with my local interlocutor and best friend on the field, Kang Rokib (pseudonym) on his life as an educator in his village. This project narrates his life history particularly his experience as a teacher, a headmaster, a breadwinner, and a father in his village. In my encounter with him, I see his life as a portrait of a middling-class rural modernizer navigating his different roles, his agency, amidst larger structural changes affecting his community.