Thomas Stodulka: Permaculture Pedagogies and Grassroots Futures in Timor-Leste
| Termin |
Dienstag, 18. November 2025, 16.15 - 17.45 Uhr |
|---|---|
| Veranstaltungsart | Vorlesung/Vortrag |
| Reihe | Anticipating Anthropologies |
| Einrichtung | Philosophische Fakultät I |
| Veranstalter | Seminar für Ethnologie |
| Veranstaltungsort | Seminar für Ethnologie, Seminarraum |
| Straße | Reichardtstraße 11 |
| PLZ/Ort | 06114 Halle (Saale) |
Beschreibung
This talk focuses on grassroots permaculture interventions in Timor-Leste that challenge the capital-intensive, project-driven logic of international aid and state-led development. Drawing on critical, embodied, and emplaced pedagogies, these initiatives emerge from sustained collaboration between teachers, students, farmers, and community organizers. They reveal how meaningful educational transformation grows from lived relationships and community care, rather than from technocratic solutions imposed from above.
At the heart of these efforts is a permaculture-based school curriculum that responds to the existential concerns of communities who often feel unheard, unseen, and uncared for by systems of “universal education” and “agricultural development.” Developed through multimodal methods—including collective mapping, storytelling, hands-on experimentation, and visual documentation—these curricula foster learning environments that value sensory experience, relational knowledge, and ecological attunement.
Where hegemonic pedagogies often erase local expertise, permaculture curricula build minor utopias that revitalize Indigenous and place-based knowledges through sweat, soil, and shared inquiry. They counteract homogenizing slogans like “education for all” and “international development,” offering instead decolonial practices of learning with—not about—ecological and cultural environments.
Rather than investing in extractive technologies or abstract metrics of success, this talk explores how permaculture-based education in Timor-Leste offers hopeful, community-rooted alternatives. These pedagogies foreground grassroots collaboration and multimodal practice as vital resources for building sustainable, post-development futures across and beyond Southeast Asia.
A lecture by Professor Thomas Stodulka (University of Münster)