Leslie Dwyer is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on issues of violence, post-conflict social life, transitional justice, the politics of memory and identity, gender, critical medical and psychological approaches to social suffering, and globalizing discourses of human rights, social activism and psychosocial repair. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2001 after completing a dissertation entitled “Making Modern Muslims: Embodied Politics and Piety in Urban Java, Indonesia.” From 2001-2003 she was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation International Peace and Security fellowship and a H.F. Guggenheim Foundation grant for field research on political violence in Indonesia. From 2003-2009 she taught at Haverford College, where she coordinated the Peace and Conflict Studies program. She joined the faculty of ICAR in the fall of 2009.
Professor Dwyer’s current research project, which has been supported by a grant from the United States Institute of Peace, addresses the aftermath of political violence in Bali, Indonesia. Working in collaboration with the Balinese anthropologist Degung Santikarma and with university and activist colleagues in Indonesia, she has spent over four years conducting intensive ethnographic fieldwork on how the state-sponsored violence of 1965-66, in which an estimated 500,000-1 million Indonesians were massacred as alleged communists, shifted cultural landscapes, shaping possibilities for personhood, political agency, community identity and narrative. She has published a number of essays on this work, focused on the social and political production of forgetting, on ritual as a site of gendered reworkings of state history, on the gendered politics of post-conflict speech, and on discourses of reconciliation and the production of “civil selves” and “transitional citizens” after violence.
Her future research plans include a major ethnographic project on “post-traumatic politics,” focused on contests over the definition and management of suffering and political subjectivity in Indonesia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia. One of the aims of this project is to bring literatures on transitional justice, the anthropology of violence, and post-conflict psychology into dialogue.
Professor Dwyer’s other current interests include an ethnographic research project and collaborative film on how Indonesians seeking asylum in the U.S. are navigating the social and political fields that have emerged out of the U.S. “war on terror”; a summer institute to train Indonesian and U.S. students social science research methods for human rights work in collaboration with the Center for History and Political Ethics (PUSDEP) at Sanata Dharma University in Jogajakarta, Indonesia; and participation on the Board of Directors of the developing Envision Peace Museum (www.envisionpeacemuseum.org) in Philadelphia.
Selected Publications:
“Building a monument: intimate politics of ‘reconciliation’ in Bali.” In Alex Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Anthropological Perspectives on Truth, Justice and Social Redress. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Forthcoming 2009.
“A politics of silences: violence, memory and treacherous speech in post-1965 Bali.” In Alex Hinton and Kevin O’Neill, eds., Genocide, Truth, Memory and Representation: Anthropological Approaches. 2009.
“Post-traumatic politics: violence, memory and biomedical discourses of suffering in Indonesia” (co-authored with Degung Santikarma), in Understanding Trauma, L. Kirmayer, R. Lemelson and M. Barad, eds. NY: Cambridge University Press. 2007.
“Speaking from the shadows: memory and mass violence in Bali” (co-authored with Degung Santikarma), in Beatrice Pouligny, Simon Chesterman and Albrecht Schnabel, eds., After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. 2006.
“The intimacy of terror: gender and violence in Indonesia,” Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 1(10). Special issue on “Indonesian Women: Histories and Life Stories.” 2004.
“When the world turned to chaos: 1965 and its aftermath in Bali,” in Genocide in Historical Perspective, eds. R. Gellately and B. Kiernan. New York: Cambridge University Press (co-authored with Degung Santikarma). 2003.
"`God is stronger than medicine': Islam and the cultural politics of contraception in Indonesia." In E. Ann Kaplan and Susan Squier, eds. Playing Dolly: Technocultural Formations, Fantasies and Fictions of Assisted Reproduction. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 1999.
"Spectacular sexuality: nationalism, development and the politics of family planning in Indonesia." In Tamar Mayer, ed. Sexing the Nation: Gender Ironies of Nationalism. New York: Routledge. 1999.
