Author and journalist Andreas Harsono started his career as a reporter for the Bangkok-based Nation and the Kuala Lumpur-based Star newspapers and since 2008 he has covered Indonesia for Human Rights Watch. Andreas joins historian Vannessa Hearman to discuss the ‘idea of Indonesia’ and consider how race and religion have become increasingly prevalent in the politics of the Post-Suharto era.
NB Andreas Harsono will be joining online.
Andreas Harsono is an author and journalist. He started his career as a reporter for the Bangkok-based Nation, and the Kuala Lumpur-based Star newspapers. He helped establish Jakarta’s Alliance of Independent Journalists in 1994, and was a founder of the Jakarta-based Institute for the Studies on Free Flow of Information and of the South East Asia Press Alliance, in Bangkok. In 2003 he helped create the Pantau Foundation, a journalist training organisation also based in Jakarta, and since 2008 he has covered Indonesia for Human Rights Watch.
Dr Vannessa Hearman is Senior Lecturer in History at Curtin University, Western Australia. She is the author of Unmarked Graves: Death and Survival in the Anti-Communist Killings in East Java, Indonesia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2018), which was awarded the Asian Studies Association of Australia’s inaugural Early Career Book Prize in 2020. She researches and writes about the politics and history of Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Through her research, she aims to foster greater cross-cultural understanding between Australians and those living in the neighbouring countries of Indonesia and Timor-Leste, as well as in illuminating how mass violence and conflict impact our region over time.