A panel discussion was held to celebrate the launch of S. Ann Dunham's book Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia (Duke University Press, December 2009). The book is a revised and edited version of her 1992 University of Hawaii dissertation on metalworking industries in Java, Indonesia. The book was edited by Ms. Dunham's graduate adviser, Alice Dewey, and fellow graduate student, Nancy Cooper. Ann Dunham's daughter, Maya Soetoro-Ng, wrote the foreword for the book and Robert Hefner wrote an analytical afterword.

The panelists talked about their current work in Indonesia. Then Ms. Zurbuchen talked about working with Ms. Dunham in Indonesia and Ms. Dunham's contributions. Maya Soetoro-Ng made remarks upon being presented with a first copy of the book.

President Barack Obama's mother, S. Ann Dunham, was an economic anthropologist and rural development consultant who worked in several countries including Indonesia through organizations such as USAID, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation. She received her doctorate from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1992. She died in 1995, at the age of 52, before having the opportunity to revise her dissertation for publication, as she had planned.