PhD Candidate Conducteding Fieldwork in Timor-Leste
PhD Candidate Conducteding Fieldwork in Timor-Leste
Katherine Trubee, a PhD candidate, spent part of her spring semester collecting data for her dissertation research in Southeast Asia. She will spend a month in Dili, Timor-Leste, Asia’s newest country.
The resistance movement in East Timor, which won independence from Indonesia in 2002 after 27 years of struggle, is one of three case studies Trubee investigates in her dissertation.
During her time on the island of Timor, she worked with social scientists from the Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e, visited national and private archives and museums, and interviewed former movement participants—many of whom are now part of the federal government.
Ahead of data collection in East Timor, Trubee spent one week in Nadi, Fiji for the Association of Social Anthropology in Oceania conference. There, she conducted with regional scholars and activists of Melanesia and broader Oceania. By participating in a session focusing on gender and the environment in the region of her third case, West Papua, Trubee received invaluable feedback on her theory of the impacts of gender on individual and group tactical decisions and, importantly, the contextualization of this theory in the Free West Papua case.
Her research and conference participation are supported by the Department of Political Science, the SEC Emerging Scholars Program, and a travel award from the Graduate Student Senate.