Environmental damage, climate change, and increasingly intense natural disasters are serious problems faced by humanity in this millennium. More ecological damage occurs due to expansive and destructive human activities. Illegal logging, expansion of mining areas, pollution of water sources, overfishing, trade-in protected wildlife continue to happen, and the scale is even greater. Meanwhile, climate change is increasingly visible and impacted communities in urban to rural areas. Coastal cities in the United States to coastal villages in the north of Java are facing the real impact of sea-level rise that causes tidal flooding. Disasters that occur bring not only material losses but also the socio-economic implications of those affected.

Today, we see the emergence of new ecological problems that have never been faced before by humanity, both in scale and characteristics. The complexity of ecological problems should be understood as nonlinear, turbulent, and dynamic. The development of technology and science in the past decade has brought benefits to (a fraction of) humans turned out to also produce undesirable impacts on the environment. The complexity of ecological problems, on the one hand, is also driven by the conditions of global politics that are vulnerable and uncertain. Efforts to overcome various ecological problems are made so far. At the personal and household level, humans try to reduce the use of plastics, recycle waste, to minimize electricity consumption and fossil fuels. Environmental movements appear on a limited scale to a global scope to drive social and political change. Governments have implemented various regulations to maintain quality and guarantee the future of the environment and humanity. But, these problems seem to become more complex and demand extraordinary effort to solve.

One of the efforts that are encouraged to overcome ecological problems and their impacts is to understand and redefine human relations with nature/environment. Science, especially social sciences, can play a vital role in this. How do social sciences (have and should) respond to increasingly complex ecological problems today? It is one of the essential questions and the starting point for discussion from this panel.

Organized by Center for Population and Policy Studies, Universitas Gadjah Mada

Covid-19 Pandemic has disrupted our live both individually and collectively. It continues produces fear and uncertainties in the whole planet. Before the COVID-19 pandemic which started in Wuhan in late 2019, the free movement of billions of people – including tourists, business people, digital nomads, refugees and students – across nations was a common part of life. In 2018, the number of international tourist arrivals rose 6% over the previous year and reached an all-time high of 1.4 billion trips. About 272 million people are residing outside their birth country. This number is projected to reach 405 million by 2050. However, as the pandemic rages on, infecting more than 7.502.278 people with over 421,000 deaths worldwide, governments have imposed travel bans and closed their borders to control the spread of the virus. Shutting down businesses and social gatherings has left nearly zero physical mobility and severely disrupted the global economy. In light of this, one can’t help but wonder: could COVID-19 spell the end of international mobility as we know it?

Shall we rethink the limits of current ‘global mobility regime’ for the sake of our immediate and long-term future?

Business activity is faltering at rates never before seen. The World Economic Outlook projects the global economy will contract by 3%, plummeting around 6.3 percentage points from January 2020. The International Monetary Fund has declared this the worst recession since the Great Depression. The coronavirus requires us to re-evaluate whether we want to continue living under this “global mobility regime” – where a great deal of economic activity relies heavily on international and regional travel.

The late German modernity theorist Ulrich Beck and British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that intertwining elements of modernity such as industrialisation, international mobility and globalisation have created a society susceptible to a variety of new risks and unforeseen consequences. These vulnerabilities – which are “systematic and cause irreversible harms” in Beck’s words – range from international ecological disaster and terrorism to global health pandemics, which is evident in the current crisis.

Extending beyond its origin in Wuhan, China, the coronavirus has spread to cause catastrophic damages across borders, nations, generations and social strata. The same advances that have helped us travel across borders at speeds and volumes never before imagined are increasing the deadliness and global reach of the virus. The biggest problem is that, the virus will remain here and there, its mobility is transnational. Coupled with the boomerang effect of industrial and post-industrial society, it fuelling the production of new risks in our planet. How post-pandemic may and will influence our immediate and long-term future social mobility? How social scientist understand and analyse these entanglements? This panel focuses in the discussion of this issue.

Organized by Department of Communication, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Gadjah Mada University

The debate regarding technology and its role in human life is a classic one. Throughout human (r)evolution, technology has frequently created problems and offered solutions, with the reality of technology and its implementation often falling short of its imagination. Today, talking about technology usually means talking about information and communication technology, which has experienced rapid growth and astonishing development. The collaborative efforts of scientists and entrepreneurs from as far afield as Silicon Valley, Bengaluru, and Beijing, have introduced diverse forms of communication, including many 'new' channels.

To imagine the future, thus, one must question what forms of media will emerge in the coming decades and how it will affect human life. In the future, will the mass media offer a solution to such problems as climate change, social segregation, poverty, inequality, and health crises (including viral and bacterial pandemics)? For many, perhaps the future is no more important than the present; indeed, the two are inexorably linked. As such, our understanding of the future of mass media must also take the complexity of current conditions into consideration.

Human social life, as influenced by media and technology,  has faced and will face both tangible and intangible threats. Humans' interactions, both with others and with the world around them, have been brought into increasingly unfamiliar territory by dynamic. New forms of social interactions have been introduced and expanded by new technologies and media. The internet has introduced a dual reality, wherein social media platforms have replaced direct personal communication. Though seemingly unconfined by spatial and temporal constraints, these new interactions are actually quite limited.

Social systems have responded to these changes through their own internal mechanisms, employing their own particular forms of adaptation and differentiation. In doing so, the political, economic, cultural, legal, and education systems have used their own internal 'codes'. In the social sciences, it is necessary to find an ideal response. Has social science (including its scholars, institutions, curricula, research, and publication) been able to respond optimally to ongoing technological advances, to future mass media, and to the social complexities created by their interplay?

This panel seeks to discuss the three dimensions of this problem: technology, future media, and the social world. It also investigates the position of the social sciences within the dynamic interplay of these dimensions.

The social world depends increasingly on digitalization. A new virtual world is emerging within which people, computers and devices keep getting data change with far reaching consequences. All areas of social life both public and private will be affected in the future. Many worry about the consequences of the digitalization of life as threatening fundamental rights such as the right to self information determination, privacy as well as social justice in the digital world. At the same  time, however, a digital world can also significantly contribute to the emergence of a more open, just as well as solidary society.

The disruptive character of the digital technology has undoubtedly significant impact on the distribution and exercise of power in the society. Reflecting on the debates on power, Steven Lukes introduced three faces of power in the 1970s in which power is exercised through three ways: decision-making power, non-decision-making power, and ideological power. The first two faces of power provides behavioral conception of power, while the third constitute a critique to them. The ideological conception of power is supposed to enable us to understand power in its personal and non observable rather than public dimensions such as  one’s wishes, preferences and subjective interests which tends to be excluded in the political processes.

As machines and algorithms instead of ideology are increasingly shape the wishes, the preferences and the interest of the individual, it is important to discuss how this change will affect our understanding of power. Is the understanding of power as reflected in Lukes’ Three Faces of Power still relevant in our society today? This session will locate power in the contemporary social world. More specifically it will analyse how power will be distributed and exercised in the contemporary social world shaped by the digital revolution.