Profile
Roy Thaniago

Roy Thaniago

PhD Researcher in Anthropology and Sociology
Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy
Spoken languages
Indonesian, English
Theme
  • Democracy and Sovereignty
  • Information and Media

PhD Thesis

 

Title: The Labour of Living Together

Expected Completion Date: 2025-2026

PhD Supervisor: Patricia Spyer and Graziella Moraes Dias da Silva (Second Reader)

My PhD research explores how people make living together possible in contexts marked by long-standing antagonism. I see living together not as a stable condition but as a fragile, dynamic process that is constantly negotiated, tested, and remade. I trace how this process is assembled through interactions between people, objects, practices, and histories.

Focusing on the gold trade in Makassar, Indonesia, I examine how fragile relations of coexistence are continually made and unmade through everyday negotiations, exchanges, and forms of labor. Gold itself, along with the practices and stories that surround it, shapes the ways people connect across ethnic and class boundaries. By following the social life of gold—from its circulation as commodity and gift to to the ways trust and risk are managed—I show how markets become spaces where differences are both reproduced and unsettled.

Bringing together ethnographic research and anthropological theory, my work highlights the unseen efforts, frictions, and accommodations that hold together interdependence in a divided society.
 

Profile


Roy Thaniago is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology Department at Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland. His doctoral research, tentatively titled The Labour of Living Together, explores how interethnic coexistence is materially and affectively sustained in an urban gold-trading street in Makassar, Indonesia. By following the everyday transactions, tensions, and practices of trust in this marketplace, his work examines how objects like gold mediate social difference, economic risk, and the fragile work of being-with across histories of violence. He holds a bachelor’s degree in music from Pelita Harapan University, Indonesia, and a master’s degree in media and communication studies from Lund University, Sweden. Before beginning his doctoral studies, he was the founding director of Remotivi, a Jakarta-based center for media research and advocacy (2010–2020).

 

Selected publications


Working papers

Public writings

Affiliations
 

  • Visiting PhD Researcher, INMIX–Research Group on Immigration, Mixedness, and Social Cohesion, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, Spring 2025
  • PhD Researcher, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Geneva Graduate Institute, 2021-ongoing
  • Editorial Board Member, Asian Journal of Media and Communication, Communication Department, Universitas Islam Indonesia, 2021-ongoing
     

RESEARCH INTERESTS
 

  • Coexistence/Conviviality
  • Ethnicity, Differences, and Categories
  • Anthropology of exchange and Marketplaces
  • Materiality
  • Gold
     

ACADEMIC  EXPERIENCES
 

  • Lecturer in media and communication studies at Universitas Indonesia and Universitas Multimedia Nusantara
     

FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS AND AWARDS
 

  • Indonesia Endowment Fund for Education

 

Personal website