Our Fellow
Atmaezer H. Simanjuntak, PhD
IFAR Fellow
Atmaezer H. Simanjuntak (Ara) is a financial and environmental anthropologist whose work examines financialisation, debt, and agrarian change in Southeast Asia, with particular attention to Indonesia’s oil palm plantation economy. He integrates long-term ethnographic fieldwork, comparative-historical analysis, and quantitative methods to generate insights relevant to scholars, policymakers, and public audiences. With more than a decade of research experience, his work explores how financial structures of credit, debt, and value-making shape the conditions under which people organize their lives—and how everyday practices, in turn, influence financial systems. Using the plantation system as an analytical vantage point, he traces how debt and value circulate across smallholder households, corporations, financial institutions, and state agencies, situating these dynamics within broader global agendas of development, sustainability, and climate transition. He is also developing a media and research platform, Sunyata Lab. More of his work can be found at www.hariara.com .
Mirna Nadia, PhD
IFAR Fellow
Mirna Nadia, PhD is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Research (IFAR), Universitas Atma Jaya, Jakarta. She earned a PhD in Sociology from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in International Health from Uppsala University. Her master’s research studies unmarried adolescents’ access to contraceptives and the demographic factors that contributed to their likelihood to use contraceptives. Drawing on Demographic and Health Survey data, her research shows that disadvantaged unmarried population groups are less likely to access contraceptives and reproductive health services despite the stated commitment of governments and healthcare providers to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Mirna’s doctoral project focuses on the politics underlying policy and legal framework that is based on assumptions about heteronormative family arrangements. Her research primarily relies on archival research to examine how these assumptions are used to govern citizens and how the resulting regulations may further disadvantage already marginalized groups whose burdens of care are often misrecognized. Mirna’s research interests lie at the intersection between critical citizenship studies and gender and sexuality studies, with a focus on the family as a locus where both the moral and political dimensions of being ‘good’ citizens are evident.