Visiting guest seminar: Birgit Bräuchler (University of Copenhagen)
'Sustaining Life, Displacing Extinction: Spatiotemporal Disjunctures in Indonesia’s Green Transition'
Based on ethnographic research in Indonesia and across digital media spaces, this paper explores how infrastructures intended to sustain and preserve life simultaneously reorganise conditions of harm, inequality, and extinction. We conceptualise this as spatiotemporal junctures: the temporal deferral and spatial displacement of violence and environmental degradation. The paper primarily focuses on Indonesia’s growing role in the global electric vehicle transition. As demand for nickel intensifies in support of decarbonisation agendas and battery production, the expansion of mining operations in biodiversity-rich eastern regions has transformed these areas into extractive frontiers of ecological destruction and social displacement. Indigenous communities face dispossession, while forms of environmental harm are obscured within narratives of ‘green’ transition and technological progress. At the same time, we witness practices of resistance and revaluation, often mediated by digital media. The paper explores how activists and affected communities use digital platforms to render visible the uneven costs of extraction, mobilise solidarity, and contest dominant imaginaries of sustainable futures, while also generating their own spatiotemporal disjunctures and hierarchies of attention and value. The paper thus highlights the paradoxical entanglements of technology, governance, extraction, and environmental justice in the Anthropocene.
Birgit Bräuchler is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include media and digital anthropology; conflict and peace studies; environmental anthropology; activism and brokerage; Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. She is the author of books like Cyberidentities at War (2005), Reconciling Indonesia (2009), and The Cultural Dimension of Peace (2015), co-edited several volumes including Theorising Media and Practice (2010), Theorising Media and Conflict (2020), and Theorising Media and Time (2026), and has published widely in peer-
reviewed journals. Currently, she is PI of a DFF-funded project on the digital-environment nexus in Indonesia (2023-2026) and of a larger interdisciplinary Danida (Danish International Development Agency) project on the challenges of digitalising waste management in smart
cities in Indonesia (2025-2030).
Event Details
- Date:
- 3 August 2026 at 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Description
'Sustaining Life, Displacing Extinction: Spatiotemporal Disjunctures in Indonesia’s Green Transition'
Based on ethnographic research in Indonesia and across digital media spaces, this paper explores how infrastructures intended to sustain and preserve life simultaneously reorganise conditions of harm, inequality, and extinction. We conceptualise this as spatiotemporal junctures: the temporal deferral and spatial displacement of violence and environmental degradation. The paper primarily focuses on Indonesia’s growing role in the global electric vehicle transition. As demand for nickel intensifies in support of decarbonisation agendas and battery production, the expansion of mining operations in biodiversity-rich eastern regions has transformed these areas into extractive frontiers of ecological destruction and social displacement. Indigenous communities face dispossession, while forms of environmental harm are obscured within narratives of ‘green’ transition and technological progress. At the same time, we witness practices of resistance and revaluation, often mediated by digital media. The paper explores how activists and affected communities use digital platforms to render visible the uneven costs of extraction, mobilise solidarity, and contest dominant imaginaries of sustainable futures, while also generating their own spatiotemporal disjunctures and hierarchies of attention and value. The paper thus highlights the paradoxical entanglements of technology, governance, extraction, and environmental justice in the Anthropocene.
Birgit Bräuchler is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. Her research interests include media and digital anthropology; conflict and peace studies; environmental anthropology; activism and brokerage; Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. She is the author of books like Cyberidentities at War (2005), Reconciling Indonesia (2009), and The Cultural Dimension of Peace (2015), co-edited several volumes including Theorising Media and Practice (2010), Theorising Media and Conflict (2020), and Theorising Media and Time (2026), and has published widely in peer-
reviewed journals. Currently, she is PI of a DFF-funded project on the digital-environment nexus in Indonesia (2023-2026) and of a larger interdisciplinary Danida (Danish International Development Agency) project on the challenges of digitalising waste management in smart
cities in Indonesia (2025-2030).