Lecture by Erica M. Larson, Guest Researcher at CTR in May 2025.

In highly religious and democratic Indonesia, corruption is seen as a pressing issue that should be curbed through educational initiatives targeted at university students as the nation’s future leaders. Yet, educational institutions have not been immune from the patronage politics and other pressures which have decreased their own moral legitimacy in the eyes of the public, students, and even the international academic community. This talk, based on ethnographic research, focuses on the strategies of university administrators and lecturers, as well as the strategies of students to make sense of and respond to this dilemma.

 

Erica M. Larson is working on the relation between religion, education, and politics in Indonesia. She completed her PhD in Anthropology from Boston University in 2019, and is currently Research Fellow in the Religion and Globalisation Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She is author of Ethics of Belonging: Education, Religion, and Politics in Manado, Indonesia and co-editor of CoronAsur: Asian Religions in the Covidian Age.