Image-Events and Democratic Publics in Indonesia

Karen Strassler discusses her recently published book, Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia (Duke UP, 2020), in conversation with Margaret Scott. After the end of authoritarian rule in Indonesia in 1998, a more open political climate converged with a changing media landscape, giving rise to a vibrant and volatile public sphere in which Indonesians grappled with the possibilities and limits of democracy amid entrenched corruption, state violence, and rising forms of intolerance. Demanding Images examines a series of "image-events" in which public images become the material ground of struggles over the nation's past and future. Focused on a turbulent period of democratization in Indonesia, but speaking to political and technological transformations of a global scope, the book argues that people increasingly engage with politics through acts of making, circulating, manipulating, and scrutinizing images.  

Karen Strassler is Associate Professor of Anthropology at CUNY Queens College and the Graduate Center. 

Watch the talk below.

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