The Pursuit of Knowledge
Reading three to four books a day as she was growing up, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Doreen Lee, realized that she was interested in not only receiving knowledge, but also in the production of knowledge. She grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia and was pushed to think about higher education elsewhere by her teachers in secondary school. She ended up pursuing her undergraduate degree at New York University. She majored in archeology because of her interest in the ways societies leave behind traces of old belief systems in their material culture and how such materials can communicate political messages. While at NYU, Lee also studied modern Chinese history, which allowed her to explore her interest in research and archives. Upon completing her undergrad, she continued her academic journey and earned her PhD in sociocultural anthropology with a focus on Southeast Asia at Cornell University.
Lee’s research focuses on the ethnography of Indonesia, particularly urban Indonesia, and the country’s cities, politics, and economy. She studies the intersection of youth and politics, especially in politically dynamic areas like Indonesia, which has undergone a long period of authoritarian rule.
Stemming from Lee’s interest in material culture and how it carries political messages, her early research focused on the history of youth activism in Indonesia and why democratic movements often emerge in authoritarian contexts. Currently, her research centers on global cities and how they condition their citizens to behave in certain ways. She is also interested in the variation of people’s responses to what some may consider to be oppressive forces, particularly how some people adjust to or even resist broad social and economic changes. She is the author of Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia, in which she tells the story of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the country’s dictatorship in 1998. Activist Archives won the Harry J. Benda Prize for best first book in Southeast Asia Studies in 2019.
Discovering Anthropology at Northeastern
Lee joined Northeastern in 2010 as an assistant professor and later became an associate professor in 2016. “Northeastern seemed like a natural fit. I was attracted to the idea of a job that was rooted in anthropology. Other faculty members at Northeastern were interested in political movements, which is my area of expertise, so I had a common vocabulary with them. There was also a continuous conversation at the university about urban locations outside the United States, which I found really intriguing.”
During her time in CSSH, she has taught a large range of courses in anthropology and interdisciplinary studies, such as Global Markets and Local Cultures, Political Anthropology, Neoliberalisms in Asia, Ethnography of South East Asia, among others. Her courses attract students of many different majors and provide opportunities for conversations between students of varied backgrounds about current and relevant topics, particularly those relating to social justice, reparations, representation, and identity.
In her teaching, Lee also invites conversations about concepts like nationalism, the mechanisms of governance, and how political culture evolves throughout history. Her courses on South East Asia allow her to teach about colonialism, postcolonialism, and the ways in which regional stories and histories matter.
Taking a dialogic, socratic approach to her teaching, Lee encourages a lot of student-led discussions. She develops a shared vocabulary with students in each course, which they use to analyze texts. Lee describes her teaching as “translational”: she encourages students to make connections between ideas on the page and their own life experiences, which helps them understand the contemporary relevance of what they are reading. This often helps students explore the subject matter more deeply through the perspectives of the people they’re reading about.
“I try to infuse an energy into the texts that makes them real. I often have authors appear as guest lecturers so that students can see that these are real people researching ideas and that these ideas are not fixed; we are all engaged in knowledge production together.”
Lee also incorporates experiential and community-based learning into her courses. In her research methods seminar Documenting Fieldwork Narratives: Oral History, Ethnography, Archival Practices, she had students work with Northeastern’s City and Community Engagement office to collect and archive narratives about the history of the Black art movement in Boston from several community members. This course provides students an opportunity to develop skills in qualitative research, digital ethnography, and digital humanities in accordance with the wishes and vision of the community members. The course also challenges students to think about archives in a justice framework.
Lee is currently working on her second book, which focuses on the financial possibilities of Jakarta. The book contains previously undocumented stories of ordinary people, many of whom don’t think their ways of living are significant but are contributing to a toolkit for surviving in difficult living conditions. The book, as Lee describes it, is a love letter to the city she grew up in and where she conducted much of her research.
“More and more people are doing collaborative work, and that is being celebrated in new ways. People are realizing that working in teams produces more knowledge and more interesting conversations, which is exciting for the future of the field.”
