Lowe, CeliaRomadhon, Dimas Iqbal2025-01-232025-01-232024Romadhon_washington_0250E_27473.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/52702Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2024This dissertation is an ethnography of power dynamics at play in two vaccination campaigns in contemporary Indonesia—measles rubella (MR) in 2017-18 and COVID-19 in 2021-22. It presents stories of subaltern making and resistance from four Indonesian cities—Banda Aceh, Jakarta, Bandung, Yogyakarta, Malang—and Seattle, United States. Weaving together these stories into four chapters, this dissertation particularly examines two trajectories within science, technology, and society studies. The first trajectory is called technicalization, a prioritization of technical interventions and specialized knowledge to address complex socioecological issues. As a critic, technicalization reframes our understanding of vaccination as an institutionalized technology that becomes detached from its promise of artificially inducing immunity. The second trajectory, compatibility, can also be seen as a counterpoint of technicalization, emphasizes a match between the progressive dream of science and technology and the everyday reality, history, and identity carried by society. Compatibility suggests that science and technology are not, and should not be, value-neutral. In the context of Indonesia, compatibility manifests in the idea of prophetic paradigm from Indonesian thinker, Kuntowijoyo, which highlights the importance of religious values in shaping the national scientific and technological progress. Chapter 1 examines how the Indonesian government’s promotion of MR vaccines deemed impure (haram) during the vaccination campaign in 2018 in the sharia region of Aceh clashed with the region’s long-standing political construction of local Islamic identities and the collective trauma generated from decades of civil war between the local separatist movement and the Indonesian military, resulting in a widely circulating perception that the vaccination was the Indonesian government’s bioterror project to harm the Acehnese younger generation. Chapter 2 presents my autoethnographic account regarding challenges I encountered when transferring information from my son’s Indonesian vaccine certificate to the United States’ vaccine certificate during his move to Seattle in 2018. I argue that vaccination certification, a form of simulacra, has become the dominant mode of representing the state of immunity while overlooking the actual embodied experience of vaccination. In Chapter 3, I capture the frail political ground in Indonesia surrounding the national COVID-19 vaccination campaign which forced the Indonesian president and high-ranking national officials volunteered to become the first recipients through a highly theatricalized performance that was broadcasted nationwide. Chapter 4 shows how Indonesian vaccine scientists are ready to incorporate the halal principle into the existing technical guidelines and to work together with non-vaccine-expert actors previously unknown in vaccine development process to develop halal-certified vaccines, by looking into the national project of halal-certified vaccine development performed in the state-owned vaccine company, Bio Farma. Altogether, these four chapters provide ethnographic-grounded reflections to envision future radical possibilities that consider the needs and perspectives of local communities behind the shaping of global science, technology, and medicine.application/pdfen-USCC BY-NC-NDCompatibilityIndonesiaPostcolonial studiesSubaltern studiesTechnicalizationVaccinationCultural anthropologyAnthropologyThesis