Walking-to-think-with in Indonesia: beginning a new discourse in area studies?

Walking-to-think-with in Indonesia: beginning a new discourse in area studies?

There is an emerging discourse on more-than-disciplinary experiential research that has the potential to bring about a new direction in Indonesian and Malaysian studies. Developments in the way that scholars engage with area studies in the future are likely to be driven in part by research that begins on the ground and outside disciplinary boundaries, and is written with a literary or poetic force that produces more complex and nuanced understandings. The idea of immersive ‘walking-to-think-with’ research is one potential trajectory for Indonesian and Malaysian studies, that encourages a more tentative, open and reflexive approach to discipline boundaries and the researcher’s relationship with ‘the field’. The author’s experience in learning the language, geography and history of one part of Indonesia through talking, walking and being present, is used to explain the potential for an embodied, seeing and feeling research practice in area studies beyond the purposivity and representational conventions of discipline-based research.