Future Challenges Lab: Co-creating sustainable practices in and beyond the Indonesian City
About this minor
This program aligns with the Indonesia – Netherlands Universities Consortium on Sustainable FuTures (INUCoST), in which the LDE universities and their Indonesian partners focus on crucial themes such as Energy and Food Transition, Water Quality Management, Environmental Justice, Digitalizing Society, Public Health, and Heritage.. Concepts like co-creation and citizen science will be your guides as you explore how Indonesia is shaped by its potential future scenarios. Utilizing mixed methods such as multimodal and sensory ethnography, social media analysis, interviews and surveys, and in some cases prototyping, you will make the future tangible and engage in meaningful discourse.
For whom?
The Future Challenges LAB is to be held entirely in Indonesia and runs from early September to beginning of December. This minor is held in collaboration with the Faculty of Social Sciences at Universitas Indonesia. The program's coordination is meticulously managed by the LDE Coordinator at the Office of Leiden University in Indonesia and conducted at the Depok Campus of Universitas Indonesia, Jakarta, where students will stay for three subsequent months.
Collaborate with fellow LDE and Indonesian students from diverse disciplines to establish your multidisciplinary theme project. Fieldwork takes you to the bustling city of Jakarta and its near surroundings, where we invite you to work on urban challenges as provided by our Dutch Embassy, Asian Development Bank, UNESCO and various research projects by our LDE and Indonesian partners. This exceptional minor program culminates in a written policy brief, offering you a platform to present your insights and solutions to a broader audience of stakeholders.
No prior knowledge of Indonesian language and culture is required and students from different disciplines are welcome. However, an interest in working with students from other disciplines and a willingness to work in a team and test new methods is a requirement.
Selection procedure
- Maximum number participants: 25
- Type of minor: Selection minor
- Selection procedure: The selection for the Minor Future Challenge Lab comprises two key components: an Essay on Ecological Footprint and an Intake Interview. Please read the Prospectus for more information.
What will you learn?
- Critical reflective analysis of the ways in which Indonesia and other countries in the global South deal with the major challenges of our time, the often ingenious and resilient answers they manage to find and what we in the global North can learn from them.
- Gain an understanding of the challenges of interdisciplinary work using concepts such as co-creation, citizen science and the application of methods from different disciplines, including ethnography, surveys, design and prototyping
- Knowledge of country, language and culture, and using this to understand the most pressing problems and communicate about them with Indonesian counterparts.
- Learn how to conduct independent research within a multidisciplinary and multinational team. Students go through all phases of the research cycle. This means, among other things, developing a chosen research theme; operationalization based on theory; writing an outline; collecting research data; analysis and reporting of data; presentation in the form of a short policy report at a one-day conference
For a more detailed overview of the courses, please refer to the Prospectus.