May 31
Prof. Thomas Stodulka
Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin

"Tasting the Soil and Sensing the Future: Localizing pedagogies of resistance in Timor-Leste’s Permaculture Youth Camps"

This talk intends to localize the travelling concept of permaculture in different contexts of learning across Timor-Leste as a systematic pathway into emergent eco-social movements regimes and learning practices. Juxtaposing permaculture-based community gardening and water conservation projects in Timor-Leste with projects implemented by the national government and international NGOS opens up anthropological inquiries into a variety of phenomena, such as contrasting the shaping of young person’s selves, personhoods, and imagined futures, issues of planetary health, nutrition, and well-being, or ways and strategies of (un-)learning and contesting normative social roles. By focusing on the practice-oriented and sensorial pedagogy of permaculture youth (juventude permakultura) camps in Timor-Leste, I inquire whether localized eco-social solidarity movements can contest state-tolerated inequality and marginalization through revitalizing local knowledges and forms of translocal collaboration through working with and sensing the soil.

Thomas Stodulka is Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology, with a special focus on Psychological Anthropology, at FU Berlin. His work focuses on the interplay between affect, emotion, youth, alternative economies and education, mental health and illness. He conducted long-term fieldwork with street-related children, young men and women in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and he has directed international research projects on the role of affect and emotion in fieldwork and ethnography, travelling concepts in mental health and illness, envy in transcultural perspectives, and critical perspectives on big data. He is currently working on permaculture, learning and shaping futures at the margins. Thomas is Associate Editor of Ethos, Brill Book Series Co-Editor of Social Sciences in Asia, and co-editor of the public anthropology blog anthrometronom.

Join us on-site in the FU Seminar Centre, Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26, 14195 Berlin, room L116.

Or online in our Webex room:
https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=m794436243b11f9800d0d1fa0ed00f3b7
meeting ID: 2731 960 1442, password: BASsummer23

About the Berlin Anthropology Seminars

This seminar series constitutes a joint initiative by anthropologists from the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at FU Berlin, ZMO, and Ethnologisches Museum. It intends to shape and cultivate an inclusive platform and open regular meeting point for exchange and discussion on current research by Berlin-based anthropologists. Please spread the word among colleagues, junior or senior, who may be interested. For further questions contact m.oschwald@fu-berlin.de

Organizers: Paola Ivanov, Claudia Liebelt, and Kai Kresse.