Khidir Marsanto Prawirosusanto is a PhD candidate at the Moving Matters program group at the Department of Anthropology and the AISSR, University of Amsterdam. Prior to joining the program, he was a junior lecturer at the Department of Anthropology, Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM), Indonesia. Under supervision of Dr. Tina Harris and Dr. Luisa Steur, his current ethnographic project explores the relation between aerotropolis development, aviation (air transport), and how people in urban-periurban Indonesia imagine the future of their city. In this project he also focuses on how planners of Yogyakarta International Airport and the aerotropolis project are dealing with complex and contradictory local and national ambitions, as well as urban futures.

For the last seven years, he has been engaged in several ethnographic research  collaboration projects on transportation and technology, sovereignty, and urban politics in Indonesia with Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Toronto.

Research methods

• Ethnography

Current research projects

• Pitching Promises, Imagining Futures: The Yogyakarta International Airport and Aerotropolis Development in Indonesia

Research grants & honours

•    2021-2025 
PhD research funding by the Beasiswa Pendidikan Indonesia LPDP for the research project on “ Pitching Promises, Imagining Futures: The Yogyakarta International Airport and Aerotropolis Development in Indonesia”
•    2014-2017 
Research funding by  Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for research collaboration three universities on “Urban Infrastructures and Informal Sovereignties: Understanding Twenty-First Century Urban Politics in Yogyakarta and Bandung”