In this occasion, the discussion topic was referred to a book with the title Women’s Empowerment in Indonesia which was written by the speaker. In that book there were seven chapters and for this discussion it focused on the topic of women’s agency. The book was a research publication which was done by the speaker in an informal village in Jakarta, known as Kampung Rawa. In her research, the speaker tried to connected the dots between the concept of the importance of women’s agency in the women’s empowerment.
The agency concept which talked in this discussion referred to the theory from the two experts. They were from Anthony Giddens and Bourdieu. Other than that, the speaker also explained about several main problems in the Kampung Rawa, one of them was the village itself was prone to eviction. Because of that situation, the people became critical and had the strategies to face the problems. The strategies were built a network with the NGO, negotiated with political parties, and negotiated with the local government. The interesting thing was, those initiatives came from the women in Kampung Rawa.
In the end of the discussion, the speaker gave advice to the researchers who were doing the same research the importance of the agency issue because it needed to be seen more deeply. In this case, every person had a different agency. It was in harmony with what she wrote in her book, the speaker said that in practice which aimed to strengthen the community could be the backfire for the community and weakened it. Because of that, the difference responses in the agencies became interesting to be studied furthermore.