In 2014, the Gerda Henkel Foundation initiated a scholarship programme supporting young humanities scholars from Africa and Southeast Asia in honour of the foundation's founder, Lisa Maskell. It is the largest international support programme for PhD students in the history of the Foundation. The Lisa Maskell Fellowships aim to strengthen universities in the partner countries, to counter the outflow of qualified young scholars and to ensure the doctoral students enjoy excellent academic training.
In the following months, L.I.S.A. will publish interviews with the Lisa Maskell Fellows from Subsaharan Africa and from Southeast Asia, in which they will talk about their research projects as well as their experiences during their academic career and the Lisa Maskell fellowship.
This week, we welcome Yudi Bachrioktora from Indonesia. After completing a BA as well as an MA at Leiden University in the Netherlands, he started his PhD at the Institute of Social Anthropology at Bern University with the thesis Between Palm Oil and Forest Conservation: Agrarian Conflict in Harapan Rainforest, Jambi Indonesia, for which he spent a year at the University of Bern in Switzerland.