Individual Paper
1. Uneven Geographies, Ecologies, Technologies and Human Futures
This paper localizes the travelling concept of permaculture in Timor-Leste as pathway into studying the juventude permakultura (permaculture youth) movement, its pedagogies of hope, sensory learning, and emotional mobilization. Focusing on permaculture-based community gardening and water conservation projects in Timor-Leste in relation to projects implemented by the nation’s significant government-NGO nexus opens up anthropological inquiries into a variety of social, political, and ecological phenomena. It contrasts divergent imaginaries of shaping young person’s selves and futures, and it taps into issues of food security, environmental awareness, and alternative knowledge construction. Whereas ongoing research localizes the travelling concept of ‘permaculture’ in Timor-Leste through the methodologies of tracing, exploring and juxtaposing, this paper focuses on the practice-oriented sensorial pedagogy of permaculture youth camps. It inquires how the eco-social youth movement contests vulnerable communities’ marginalization through acknowledging local knowledge and connecting it with translocal permaculture techniques. More precisely, the paper focuses on the sensory and affective dimensions of learning in vulnerable communities and disaster-prone landscapes. It zeroes in on tasting the soil and mobilizing the future as pedagogies of hope and considers these as powerful ways of securing (future) livelihood.
Thomas Stodulka
Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Muenster, Germany, Germany