AMINEF and Universitas Jenderal Soedirman, Purworkerto invite you to a Fulbright Research Presentation (FRP) on English Literature by Dr. Tri Murniati on September 9, 2019, at 09.00 – 11.00 at Universitas Jenderal Soedirman, Purworkerto.
Dr. Tri received her doctorate degree in English literature at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville under the 2014 DIKTI-funded Fulbright Grants for Indonesian Lecturers – PhD program. Her research interests are immigrant literature, migration studies, comparative literature, and border studies.
Her dissertation “Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia: An Alternative to Address Indonesian Domestic Workers’ Issues” explored the portrayal of Indonesian Domestic Workers’ (IDWs) migratory experiences as manifested in their written narratives. In this dissertation, Dr. Tri used the term IDWs’ narratives to refer to Sastra Buruh Migran Indonesia (SBMI). Dr. Tri argued that IDWs’ narratives, as the creative work of IDWs, challenged the stereotypes that are associated with this community, such as IDWs are uneducated, gaudy, unskilled, and not good enough for anything besides domestic work. This also overturns the derogatory perceptions of the workers that are produced and reproduced through media outlets.
Their writings showed that these women are not merely laborers who clean and tend to their employers’ needs. In fact, IDWs needed to adapt to a wide variety of cultural, social, and linguistic tensions and conflicts in the host countries. They have to be not only “doers” but also “thinkers” and deal with a wide range of practical as well as emotional issues in strange and unusual surroundings. Articulating their stories by using the first-person perspective, IDWs try to contest stereotypes and propose new definitions of domestic work and those who perform it. Finally, their writing revealed the struggles that IDWs face in asserting their rights as human beings, for in the process of migration, these women are often dehumanized.
Dr. Tri is a lecturer at the English Department, Universitas Jenderal Soedirman. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature from Universitas Diponegoro.
All Fulbright Research Presentations are open to the public and free of charge.
