LECTURE | Thomas Stodulka: The glocalized emotional economies of ‘the street child’ – A case study from Yogyakarta, Indonesia (19 July 2012, Freiburg)

Compared to many other Indonesian cities Yogyakarta is peculiar in terms of its enormous proliferation of NGOs, which attract both local and foreign activists and social scientists. Until recently, ‘street children’ have been a central part of the city’s ‘charity circus’. But with the shifting of international donor organizations’ priorities in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in 2006, the issues of ‘street children’ faded into oblivion.

The article aims to illustrate the impact of Yogyakarta’s perpetually changing charity landscape on ‘street children’s’ coping strategies. By analyzing the children’s and young adults’ social encounters with NGO-activists, I will demonstrate that their practices of collective identity construction are highly intertwined with global NGO-policies and their definitions of what a real street child is. Only if they manage to embody the images of this ‘universalized street child’ image and adapt to continuously changing global NGO-policies, socio-economic security networks and emotional well-being can be established.

Thomas Stodulka is a researcher at the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” and lecturer at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at FreieUniversität Berlin, Germany. He conducted fieldwork in Yogyakarta, Indonesia for over three years between 2001 and 2009. He is currently finishing his PhD on the “Coming of Age on the Streets of Java” and is co-heading an interdisciplinary research project on cross-cultural comparison of envy.

When: 19 July 2012, 16 -18h

Where: "Seminarraum" of the Anthropology Depertment, Werthmannstrs. 10, 1st floor