Research

My first long-term ethnographic study elaborates on the emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) of psychosocial support workers for women who are affected by patriarchal violence in Indonesia. It examines how the display and suppression of emotions are used to navigate clients through the counseling process in the specific context of a Women’s Crisis Center (WCC) in Java, Indonesia, and explores how employees deal with the daily exposure to violent testimonies, living in the patriarchal society themselves.

The project relates to the changing roles and establishment of women’s movements in the recent Indonesian past, stressing strong women’s organizations at the beginning of the 20th century, and their demolishment by state-circulated propaganda and state violence during the New Order regime (1967-1998). It explores how women’s organizations maneuver private matters in public institutions 25 years after the Reformation (1998), during which many movements re-established and took an important role in the struggle for women’s rights.

My project will add a deeper anthropological understanding to the studies of affect and emotion by examining the connection between culture-specific display rules (Ashforth and Humphrey, 1993) and orders of feeling (Stodulka 2019) in relation to internalized practices of the self, emotion control, and potency (Keeler 1987) during the crisis response. It investigates how employees (1) display and suppress emotions in order to support clients during the consultation, police investigation, and court hearing; (2) manage their own emotion display to protect themselves from work-related stressors and dangers; and (3) gain potency to navigate through diverse settings, contesting omnipresent patriarchal power asymmetries in a culture-conform way.

The project explores how the WCC itself defines and promotes concepts of gender roles inside and outside the working context and what those findings reveal about ‘culture’ in a setting of change.

Research Focus

• affects & emotions
• emotional labor, care work & self-care practices
• patriarchal violence & conflict management
• personhood & self
• psychological anthropology
• organizational anthropology