The TRANSCEND team held an important meeting at the newly established Indonesian National Research and Innovation Agency (Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional, BRIN) – the partner for our research in Jakarta – and signed a letter of agreement to kick-start our joint research activities. After we had to postpone our work in Indonesia due to the COVID-19 pandemic several times, this is an important milestone.

Our core partner in BRIN is the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities (ISSH), one of BRIN’s twelve research institutes. The ISSH has the task of i) producing knowledge that meets ethics and research integrity and ii) conducting research and scientific activities that make a real contribution to answering Indonesian issues and contemporary dynamics. The TRANSCEND team will work closely with researchers from the Research Center for Population (Pusat Riset Kependudukan) and other research centres under ISSH.

For our meeting, we were honoured to be hosted by the chairman of the Research Centre for Population, Dr Nawawi, and welcomed furthermore by the chairpersons of the Research Center for Regional Studies, the Research Center for Law, the Research Organization of Archeology, Language and Manuscript and the coordinator of the ISSH research. Moreover, several senior and junior researchers at BRIN who conduct research close to our focus in TRANSCEND joined the meeting.

After a general introduction to the TRANSCEND project by Prof. Garschagen, Jan Petzold, Mia Wannewitz, and Veronika Zwirglmaier, and a welcome speech by Dr Nawawi, the other chairpersons and researchers introduced their work and we discussed potential synergies and various opportunities to collaborate.

We are excited to work closely with BRIN over the next years and plan to go back to Jakarta in 2023 for the next concrete steps.