Indonesian labor migration study awarded NSF grant

October 23, 2017

Professor Nancy Peluso has been awarded a National Science Foundation Geography and Spatial Sciences Program grant. Peluso, along with researchers from the University of Hawaii and University of Indonesia, will conduct a three-year study on labor migration and its impacts on Indonesian land use policy and labor markets.

Peluso’s research will combine approaches from political ecology and land change science to access land remittance patterns and labor migration in four districts of Indonesia that are experiencing large-scale land acquisitions and transnational or domestic labor migration. Peluso’s co-investigators include ESPM alumna Lisa Kelley, Kimberly Carlson of the University of Hawaii, and Suraya Afiff of the University of Indonesia. The team will collect data using mixed methods of research, including ethnography, in-depth interviews and oral histories, land genealogies, and the use of historical maps and satellite data to address their research questions. Collaborating with Indonesian researchers in each site, Peluso’s team will also coordinate annual data sharing, planning, and training workshops.

Encompassing a broad range of topics in land and forest management, agrarian politics, and socio-environmental change, Peluso’s research examines social processes that affect the management of forests and other land-based resources. She is currently the Henry J. Vaux Distinguished Professor in Forest Policy and is a recipient of Berkeley’s Sarlo Award for Graduate Student Mentoring, and has also served as a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellow, and as the Edward J. Taaffe Distinguished Lecturer in Geography. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Program and the Humanities Research Institute, among others.