Worlding Permaculture School Gardens: Translocal Connectivities and Minor Utopias in Timor Leste

Abstract

In times of accelerated globalization, with the overheated circulation of lifestyle desires and future imaginaries of the good life, children’s education has become a site of contested governmental, activist, and entrepreneurial assemblages that connect translocal actors and communities. The literature on transnational education has demonstrated that knowledge circulation prompts the production of “mobile worlds”—the movement of bodies, ideas, and finances. This article extends this well-established body of research and focuses on the connectivities of “minor utopias” emerging from within and across borders. It builds on past ethnographic work in Indonesia as a route into a discussion of recent observations of the emerging national permaculture curriculum pertaining to primary school education in Timor Leste. To theorize the relations and processes that connect translocal actors and communities, I draw on the concept of “worlding”—the continual process of emplacing translocal ideas and assemblages.