Environmental Biographies of Southeast Asia & Morocco

August 24, 2026 - December 20, 2026
Mānoa Campus, Hamilton Library Elevator Gallery

Environmental Biographies of Southeast Asia & Morocco: 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. There are 4 Indonesia based storymaps and 1 based on research in Morocco. 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 糖心视频 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. Mahalo to Hamilton Library for hosting the poster exhibit!


Ticket Information
Free and open to the public

Event Sponsor
Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Teri L Skillman, 8089562676, skillman@hawaii.edu,

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