Organizer: Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University

Type/Location: In person / Ithaca, NY

Description:

Government data on Indonesia’s environment is in question. When state officials contest deforestation and fire estimates that differ from their numbers, activists and scientists regard these actions as a suppression of science and, for some, even anti-science. In response, state officials reason that such estimates, often provided by foreign scientists, are unverified by field surveys.   
 
The talk considers a lesser-known story at the interface of this contradiction, that of topographical field surveys and their significance for the formation of professional work and scientific expertise. While field surveys are claimed to allow for the faithful validation of remote sensing data, what is missed is how they refashion scientists as technologists with mediated access and control over otherwise contingent resource frontiers.  
 
In Indonesia, reduced research budgets, rapid environmental change, and the advent of machine learning in the last decade have greatly transformed the role of field surveys in the mapping sciences, forcing scientists to either question or hold more tightly to prior regimes of verification.  
 
To explore these shifting constructions of the field, I bring together Southeast Asian studies scholarship on engineering with conceptual work on the field in the history of science to explore the shifting material and social basis of environmental governance in Indonesia today. 

Cindy Lin is an ethnographer and information science assistant professor at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. Her first single-authored book project explores statecraft and computing practices in the environmental and mapping sciences in Indonesia and the professional identities and government institutions that emerged from these efforts.

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