Rwandan solutions to Rwandan problems: Heritage decolonization and community engagement in Nyanza District, Rwanda

Highlighting the rural district of Nyanza in Rwanda, this article examines community relations to heritage resources. It investigates the possibilities for more ethical, engaged models of heritage management which can better deliver on agendas of decolonization and development. Our research finds that Nyanza’s heritage stakeholders highly value heritage’s social and economic roles, but communities are also significantly alienated from heritage resources. In seeking to bridge this gap, heritage professionals utilize a discourse of technocratic improvement, but community leaders emphasize ideas of ownership, drawing on higher state-level discourses of self-reliance and “homegrown solutions.” They mobilize the state’s own attempts to filter developing, decolonizing initiatives through Rwandan frameworks to advocate for communities’ right to participate in heritage. This local agency offers a roadmap for utilizing favorable aspects of existing governance to push heritage management toward community engagement and decolonization.

Pemberdayaan Masyarakat Melalui Program Rumah Literasi Kreatif di Kabupaten Kutai Kartanegara

Sampai hari ini, sebagian besar penduduk dari daerah tertinggal di Indonesia masih menghadapi persoalan kualitas pendidikan yang kurang memadai. Mengeksplorasi program kolaborasi edukasi antara Rulika Bunga Kertas dan perusahaan Pertamina Hulu Sanga Sanga, makalah ini berupaya mengembangkan pemahaman tentang bagaimana inisiatif pemberdayaan diimplementasikan dengan menempatkan masyarakat lokal sebagai subjek pembangunan. Terkait dengan hal ini, sembilan pemangku kepentingan di Desa Beringin Agung, Kabupaten Samboja di wawancarai dan ditemukan bahwa pemberdayaan lembaga lokal telah berkontribusi efektif terhadap peningkatan literasi dasar bagi penerima manfaat. Selain itu, pemberdayaan agensi lokal juga terbukti telah memberikan efek keberlanjutan, mengindikasikan keberhasilan program. Secara keseluruhan, Rulika Bunga Kertas telah memainkan peranannya sebagai solusi efektif bagi warga dari daerah transmigrasi. Makalah ini dengan demikian, memberikan wawasan penting dalam studi tentang relasi komunitas-sektor swasta dalam inisiatif pemberdayaan. Kata Kunci: Rumah Literasi Kreatif; Rulika Bunga Kertas; Taman Baca Masyarakat It is widely acknowledged that a key proportion of residents from backward areas in Indonesia are remained to suffer from inadequate quality of education. Exploring the case of a fruitful collaboration of Rulika Bunga Kertas and Pertamina Hulu Sunga company, this paper aims at developing an understanding of how empowerment initiatives are implemented by situating local communities as development subjects for improving education in Beringin Agung Village, Samboja District. Based on interviews with 9-stakeholders, the findings demonstrate that empowering local agencies have provided them with the necessary capacity to help their residents in improving basic literacy skills. Furthermore, the empowered local agency has contributed to sustainability, indicating a successful empowerment strategy. Overall, Rulika Bunga Kertas has expanded and played as an effective solution for residents from transmigration areas. This paper, therefore, offers essential insight into discussing the community-private sector relationship against empowerment initiatives.. Keywords: Rumah Literasi Kreatif; Rulika Bunga Kertas; Community Reading Gardens

Comparison of P-Wave Tomography Model in Sunda-Banda Arc by Using Data from BMKG and ISC

The tectonic setting of our study area is located between the Island of Java and Timor Leste. The complexity of this region is started with two different plates, The Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate that move with different orientations and convergence rate. This area also shows active seismic activity and has a series of active volcanoes as a product of subduction and collision. To deepen understand this area, we perform delay time tomography using FMTOMO package that includes 3-D finite-difference based ray tracing and sub-space inversion procedure. We used two different sets of data, the first one is 4 years data catalog from the Indonesian Agency of Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics, and the second one is 47 years of data from the International Seismological Centre. Data from the local Indonesian show agency shows a fewer number of events but more focus clusters. Meanwhile, the data from ISC catalog has more events and evenly distributed data. However, we also noticed that data from ISC has cluster events located at the same depth that can be improved with events relocation for better depth estimation. The Checkerboard models from both data set show a comparable result, though data from ISC show a better recovered model at a deeper depth and shallow part in the eastern area. The checkerboard from the local Agency shows slightly better results in the shallow part. Next, we invert delay time for each data set using we optimized damping and smoothing parameters. Final tomogram models show that data from the local Agency show a more continuous fast velocity band representing a downgoing subducting slab and possible back-arc thrust while results from the ISC data show a more detached fast velocity band that could be contributed from fixed depth problem in the data set. However, we noticed that data from ISC show a higher amplitude low-velocity anomaly especially in the shallow depth

CEFR as Language Policy: Opportunities and Challenges for Local Agency in a Global Era

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) has become one of the most widely cited documents in language education across the globe, its influence now felt far beyond the confines of Europe, the context for which it was originally produced. In Malaysia, CEFR was given particular prominence in the Malaysia Education Blueprint 2013-2025 and English Language Education Reform in Malaysia: The Roadmap 2015-2025, both of which positioned the framework as the primary yardstick by which curricula were to be developed and against which achievements (or lack thereof) were to be evaluated. This paper examines CEFR from the perspective of language policy, focussing particularly on the implications this document has for local agency in the Malaysian context. The paper begins by examining the constructs of language and language education underlying CEFR, pointing in particular to how these reflect the socio-political context for which the framework was developed. The next section examines how policy texts in the Malaysian context, in particular the 2015 Roadmap, have interpreted CEFR, highlighting in particular the way that these texts (as other policies across the globe) have tended to treat the CEFR reference levels as a global standard, with little scope for local agency. The final section considers alternative, localized models for using CEFR as language policy in Malaysia, in particular how the framework may be used in support of an inclusive agenda in which diversity and multilingualism are embraced.

Local Infrastructures for Peace

The way “the local” had been interpreted led to contrasting top-down or bottom-up understandings of local infrastructures for peace. This chapter presents a reinterpretation of the relevance of infrastructures for peace from a practitioner’s perspective, considering past experiences and current theoretical debates. It argues for an appreciation of the complex, interlinked nature of global, national, and local conflicts and the necessity of flexible yet sustained and productive dialogue platforms at the points of frictional interactions at and between all these levels. The capacity to initiate and support such dialogue platforms where, crucially, local agency is respected is at the core of the approach that became known as “infrastructures for peace.”

Local Ownership, Legitimacy, and Peacebuilding

This chapter considers two fundamental questions at the core of the local ownership norm—ownership of what and ownership by whom—in light of fragmenting consensus around the very meaning of peacebuilding. In the first place, the referent object of ownership—the idea of a distinct, coherent, and self-contained peace process—is becoming increasingly elusive in most war-to-peace transitions, and increasingly difficult to differentiate from broader social, political, or economic developments that profoundly shape the nature of postwar transitions. At the same time, there has been a deepening polarization of views around who precisely counts as a relevant local for the purposes of peacebuilding, and an ongoing failure to bridge elite-centric and everyday-centric understandings of local agency. Both trends have significant implications for the future of peacebuilding as a coherent project.

Khedas in South-Eastern Bengal: Colonialism and Wildlife 1765–1810

This article examines the colonial impact on wildlife in the region of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. Taking the English East India Company's engagement with the Indian elephant as a point of entry into colonial environmental practices, the article focuses on the kheda or elephant-catching operations in the three districts of Sylhet, Chittagong and Tipperah. Unlike the tiger, which was classified as dangerous and decimated during the colonial era, the elephant was less liable to be killed on account of its military utility, but was caught and domesticated in large numbers. The article argues that the EIC, following pre-colonial traditions and Mughal practices, attempted to control the channels of supply of the animal in the three above-mentioned areas, but in doing so they were perennially dependent on local agency and native expertise. Depending on the native tracksmen, elephant-keepers and traders, the EIC officials acquired their knowledge on the elephant and the Indian environment largely through indigenous collaboration and initiated global transfers of knowledge between the coloniser and colonised environments.

The Imperial Context of the Pentateuch

This chapter explores the variety of ways in which the Persian imperial context may have helped to shape, directly or indirectly, the authority and the content of the Torah as the five books of Moses. It critically evaluates the theory that the Pentateuch was officially authorized by the Persians, and finds this scenario much less convincing than more subtle accounts of imperial pressure giving rise to a series of compromises—between priestly and non-priestly literature and between the temples of Jerusalem and Mount Gerizim. Unlike the book of Ezra, the Pentateuch studiously avoids giving priority either to Jerusalem or to Gerizim, while hexateuchal redactions affirm the north. The chapter also considers proposals for understanding the pentateuchal traditions through the lens of postcolonial studies, clarifying the ways in which this research paradigm highlights the dynamics of mimicry, while undermining assumed distinctions between local agency and imperial administration.