Environmental Biographies of Southeast Asia & Morocco
August 24, 2026 – December 18, 2026
Location: Elevator Gallery
Field-Based Research on Land, Water, and Power
Consider a terraced rice paddy on an Indonesian hillside, fed by mountain forests upstream, or an abandoned well along Morocco’s Rif coast. Each tells a connected biography of environmental change: not just a story of place, but a record of who has power over land and water, and who doesn’t. This exhibition follows five student research teams into Indonesia and Morocco to ask the same question in two very different settings: how do people live with, depend on, and fight for the landscapes around them?
This exhibit spotlights political ecology in practice: research that treats environmental change as a story about power and history, not just soil, trees, crops, and rainfall. Rather than studying these places from a distance, our undergraduate and graduate teams carried out fieldwork directly alongside local universities, community leaders, and residents. We conducted oral histories and mapped water and land use, learning as much as anything how to do research with people in very different parts of the world, and we committed to returning our findings to the communities who helped produce them. Each poster also includes accessible links to the research process, along with additional StoryMaps for each place.
Indonesia
Four of the posters come from the 2026 UH Mānoa Indonesia Field School, a collaboration with Universitas Hasanuddin (UNHAS) and Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in South Sulawesi.
Undergraduate and graduate students worked in mentored teams, with PhD candidates leading specialized training in oral history, participatory mapping, and community-based research, to document how rural communities navigate forest governance, agricultural change, water access, and rural infrastructure.
- Channeling Persistence: Maintaining Hydro-Social Territories through Water-Land Institutions in Bulu’-Bulu’, South Sulawesi
- In the Shadow of High-Yield Rice: The Survival of Social and Intellectual Networks Beyond Production in Pattallassang
- Tomato Tomorrow: Livelihoods Shaped by Road Access
- Is Our Water Worth Dying For?
Morocco
The fifth poster, What the Wells Remember: Oral History, Water, and the Power of Place Naming in the Amazigh Rif, comes from a UROP-funded project on Amazigh oral histories along Morocco’s Rif coast, asking the same core question in a different setting: who controls water, and how do communities remember and defend it?
Together, these five projects show that studying forests, land, and water always means studying with people, especially the people whose lives our research touches. This means navigating the complexities of their institutions, their histories, and their claims on the future.
This exhibition was made possible with support from the UH Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), the College of Social Sciences (CSS), the East-West Center (EWC), and Faculty-Sponsored Study Tours (FaSST).
We are deeply grateful to the communities across South Sulawesi and the Rif who opened their homes, their histories, and their daily lives to our students.
