- Title
- When the city forest is ours: urban environmentalism and youth in Bandung, Indonesia
- Creator
- Alam, Meredian
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- In 2013 Backsilmove, a youth-led environmental organisation, engaged in the reclaiming of the Babakan Siliwangi urban forest movement located in Bandung, the capital of Indonesia’s West Java province. Despite the fact that Bandung city authorities still tightly control political activism and do not provide much space for political dissent, these young people surfaced as youthful environmental activists who used diverse movement repertoires to convey an environmental safeguarding message to the public. By framing the Backsilmove case with a Bourdieusian approach to analyse that environmental movement, I aim, in this doctoral thesis, to show the way young activists gravitated towards public protest, which, notably, could put them at risk of arrest. To critically evaluate the elements of their at-risk involvement, I interviewed in depth and observed ethnographically 26 ex- Backsilmove activists from November 2014 to May 2015 in Bandung and Jakarta, to answer the overarching question of how environmental activist habitus and ecological dispositions were formed, defined, and negotiated within the family, school, and organisational milieux, leading activists to embark on the Backsilmove campaign. Analysis of narrative interview data depicted early interaction with nature in the realm of school and family where young activists first began to embrace a strong support system for ecological conservation. This ecological predisposition was evidently shaped by family and school influences. It was primarily developed through active interaction with the natural world, reading relevant textbooks as well as fiction and non-fiction literature, and further efforts to better understand natural phenomena. Findings of this study suggest that ecological habitus is not only developed, but also contested and fought for through habituation of ecological awareness and/or environmental activism. Furthermore, it appears that social capital that encourages ecological habitus formation and predisposition are also important. It seems clear that the relevant cultural capital of the study participants was prefigured through previous active participation in the environmental organisation Greenpeace, which allowed the young activists to maintain their position within the environmental movement as a field of struggle. This was identified as the encouragement phase for them to develop their radical habitus. This radical habitus became a basis for later structuring new models of activism. Their Greenpeace experience equipped the young activists with a broader structure of personal development that helped them to transfer their embodied radical cosmology and repertoires of resistance to Backsilmove. This was the foundation for the subsequent success of the Backsilmove campaign. To create this movement, they relied upon the particular worldviews and perceptions about environmental phenomena they had already experienced.
- Subject
- Backsilmove; urban forest; environmental movement; habitus; Bourdieu
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1385048
- Identifier
- uon:32160
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Meredian Alam
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
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| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 3 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 454 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |