Meet Our New Wadsworth Fellows: Rachma Lutfiny Putri
With the support of the Wadsworth International Fellowship, Rachma Lutfiny Putri will continue her training in sociocultural anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, hosted by Freek Colombijn.
My most consequential encounter with anthropology occurred in 2021 when I conducted field research among Jakarta’s urban poor communities during the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of the collaborative research I undertook with urban poor organizations, I had an opportunity to visit a waste picker community in Central Jakarta where I interviewed female waste-pickers. The experience lingered in my mind; I was amazed by the stories of how these women navigated their precarious livelihoods and pursued their everyday life strategies.
This field experience sparked my academic interest around waste and waste pickers in Indonesia. Then I discovered the work of Dr. Freek Colombijn, a senior anthropologist whose expertise in urban Indonesia, waste studies, and waste pickers matched my own interests. I enrolled to study with him at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam for my master’s program. Given that his scholarship and extensive research experience on waste, urban anthropology and history, and contemporary Indonesia sharpen my critical views on waste studies and anthropology. I decided to pursue my PhD with him as my supervisor.
Additionally, VU’s Anthropology department offers diverse intellectual environments, experts on different world regions, rigorous theoretical training, and places a strong emphasis on fieldwork. The department also has a lab on Infrastructures, Sustainability and Commons and a lab on Ethnographic Impact, both related to my research.
My Doctoral research examines the question of value in the waste recycle chain. For my PhD, I will explore the waste recycling chain in Indonesian and the many actors and value-making processes that are involved. My doctoral project asks two main questions: 1) How is value, understood both in terms of economic profit and labor processes, created in the waste recycling chain in Indonesian cities, and 2) Which actors benefit from value creation in said chains. In this project, I approach waste not only as garbage but also as a commodity. My research aims to analyse how waste value/recycling chains operate, which tends to be an area often overlooked in waste studies.