Date of Award

Spring 5-22-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

MA - Master of Arts

Department

Expressive Therapies

Advisor

Meg Chang, EdD, BC-DMT, LCAT, NBCC

Abstract

The Chinese-Indonesian population is a bicultural and biethnic population with an extensive history of racism and discrimination in Indonesia since the colonial era. This situation has caused confusion on their ethnic-racial identity. Ethnic-racial identity is a social construct that defined one's sense of self within society. The lack of sense of self may negatively impact one's perception towards self and others. This project addresses this issue by identifying the current Chinese-Indonesian ethnic-racial identity from the perspective of the secondary witness to the genocide event happening in 1998. The paper will evaluate how the 1998 genocide event has impacted the Chinese-Indonesians' perception of their ethnic-racial identity. Using a Dance/Movement Therapy approach, a community engagement project was held to understand this phenomenon through six Chinese-Indonesian participants' responses during the session. The session offered a 2.5 hour therapeutic experience to the participants through an online platform. This thesis employs an interpretive phenomenological analysis framework and art-based movement response to examine the result. The result suggests that the participants have embraced their hybrid identity with the presence of unresolved trauma, resilience, and hope within this community. The outcome also proposes that this community is suitable for body-based practice. This paper recommends that Dance/Movement Therapy could be an effective tool in promoting social justice within this community. A strong emphasis on fighting forgetfulness presents in this paper.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Download

Share

COinS
 

Rights

The author owns the copyright to this work.