Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on connectivities of minor utopias in childhood education. It zeroes in on the emerging national arts and culture curriculum of primary school education in Timor-Leste that contextualizes permaculture school gardening as ecological and economic powerhouse shaping cultural futures.

Paper long abstract:

In times of overheated circulation of lifestyle desires and future imaginaries of “the good life”, early childhood education has become a site of contested governmental, activist, economic and entrepreneurial initiatives that connect and assemble a grand variety of translocal actors, transnational organizations, philanthropies, and cosmopolitanized imaginatives. This paper focuses on the connectivities of “minor utopias” emerging from within and across borders. It builds on past work in Indonesia as a route into the emerging national arts and culture 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. The paper provokes a discussion on the connectivity and comparison of knowledges from so-called “peripheries” with those from so-called “cosmopolitanism” and “urbanism”.