About Jaida Samudra

Dr. Jaida Samudra (she/they) is a medical anthropologist with over two decades experience editing scholarly articles and books in the social sciences and humanities. Having studied linguistics and lived in Japan, China, and Indonesia, Jaida is adept at understanding different cultural logics and interpreting the intent of scholars writing in English as a second language. Her coaching and workshop facilitation skills were honed by running conversational salons in California and Minnesota in the early 1990s, developing cross-cultural communications seminars for international students at the East-West Center in Hawai‘i, and leading classes in the Indonesian self-defense art, White Crane Silat, which she has been practicing since 1984.

Jaida’s own scholarship is centered in Oceania and East and Southeast Asia, with current interests in bioethics, neurological hypercapacities, complementary and alternative medicine, martial arts, and methods for conducting ethnographic research on somatic experiences. Her most recent publication is “Sensing ‘Feeling’ in Indonesia’s Persatuan Gerak Badan (Body Movement Unification) School,” published in Search After Method: Sensing, Moving, and Imagining in Anthropological Fieldwork (Laplante et al. 2020).

Jaida is currently working on a writing and publishing manual for qualitative and mixed-methods researchers.