Editors’ Note

This edition of SOJOURN opens the second year in which the journal appears three times annually and in which it features in its March issue the scholarship of young Southeast Asianists presented at the annual Southeast Asian Studies Graduate Conference at Cornell. The first four articles published herein originated in some of the best papers from the fifteenth occurrence of that conference, held in March 2013. These articles draw on work undertaken in the course of doctoral study in the Netherlands, Singapore and the United States and in the fields of visual, media and culture studies; science and technology studies; and history.

Dafna Ruppin’s article on the changing nature of the spaces in which the people of colonial Surabaya could go to movies makes vivid the interaction among physical structures, the growth of a colonial port city, the demand for entertainment and the evolution of colonial society. It also provides a valuable complement to important earlier scholarship on Surabaya undertaken by such scholars as William Frederick and Howard Dick. Readers will gain from reading against Ruppin’s article Iskandar Zulkarnain’s on contemporary means of visual entertainment in Indonesia. His study of Nusantara Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game inspired by Indonesia’s precolonial past, explores the success of the game as a vehicle for fostering popular nationalism among its presumably young players. Iskandar also introduces to SOJOURN an entirely new scholarly vocabulary, drawn from the study of video-gaming.

Anto Mohsin opens fresh perspective on the politics of provincial Indonesia during the New Order in his article on rural electrification. He uses approaches rooted in science and technology studies to interrogate the record of General Soeharto’s technocracy. And his work exemplifies an interest in technology and society in the study of Indonesia, pioneered not least by Joshua Barker, that has to date proved less prominent in work on other parts of the region.

Benjamin Freud’s own study of makers of economic policy, in this case in the context of Indochina during the Pacific War, also uncovers surprising dimensions of their activities, not least in the promotion of the colony’s artisanat.

Cornell demographer Lindy Williams’s comparative study of population policies in Singapore and those of Thailand and Indonesia was in its original form for the keynote address at last year’s Southeast Asian Studies Graduate Conference. We are grateful to Professor Williams for submitting her piece to SOJOURN, not least as it complements so directly the two research notes that appear in this issue of the journal. In the first of those notes, Laila Kholid Alfirdaus draws lessons from the aftermath of the 2009 Padang earthquake for post-disaster rescue and recovery in ethnically complex settings. In the second, Siah Poh Chua examines sex ratios at birth among Chinese Malaysians in the context both of the wider Chinese world and of economic and social change in Malaysia. Each of these two scholars’ research notes exemplifies SOJOURN’s interest in processes of social change in Southeast Asia and resultant political and cultural challenges to the region’s societies.