Rangga Kala Mahaswa
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=oDWGleoAAAAJ&hl=id
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9823-5884
Research title: The Politics of Plate Tectonics in the Archipelagic State
Research summary
This dissertation is a historical and archival study of geological knowledge in a postcolonial
archipelagic state. It examines how plate tectonic theory has been translated, institutionalised, and
mobilised in Indonesia since post-independence (1945) to the present, and how geological knowledge
has become entangled with state power, national development agendas, governance of territory, and
exploitation of resources. Rather than treating the theory of plate tectonics as a universal scientific
framework, this project approaches it as a travelling concept and knowledge whose meanings, uses,
and authority have been reshaped through Indonesian scientific institutions, political regimes, and
archipelagic spatial as pregiven geographical conditions.
The dissertation argues that the making of plate tectonic knowledge in Indonesia constitutes a form
of political geology: a co-production of the earth, Earth science, and state power in which geological
theory becomes a technique for governing uncertainty, legitimising development, and managing
geological risk. From this point, by foregrounding Indonesian geologists as epistemic agents rather than
passive recipients of global science, the project demonstrates how geological translation produces
contested Earth futures that are lived in the present, institutionalised through state infrastructures, and
embedded in the governance of the future of Anthropocene challenges. Geological knowledge, in this
dissertation, is not merely descriptive of the Earth, but actively participates in shaping political relations
between territory, nature, and society in a postcolonial archipelagic state, like in Indonesia.
Supervisors
Additional information
Mahaswa, Rangga Kala, 'The Anthropocene' (25 June 2026), in Lynette Spillman (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Sociology (New York, NY, online edn, Oxford Academic, 25 June 2026 - ), https://doi-org.ezproxy2.lib.gla.ac.uk/10.1093/9780197852729.003.0040.
