Colloquium: Worlding School Gardens – Anthropological Perspectives on Child-Nature Relations

  • Date: Jan 21, 2020
  • Time: 05:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speakers: Thomas Stodulka and Katja Liebal
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
  • Room: Small Conference Room
  • Host: Center for the History of Emotions
  • Contact: sekfrevert@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

The Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, led by Prof. Ute Frevert, cordially invites all interested to attend its winter semester 2019/2020 colloquium:

Thomas Stodulka and Katja Liebal, Freie Universität Berlin

Worlding School Gardens – Anthropological Perspectives on Child-Nature Relations

Sustainability education is a timely, urgent topic. This talk reflects on how historical and empirical studies might investigate which factors determine children’s abilities to engage with their natural environment and their attitudes towards it. It discusses an interdisciplinary, multi-methods approach to children’s developing relationships with nature and asks how children’s relationships with other living beings and their inanimate environment develop. Which emotional and cognitive capacities shape children’s relationships with their natural environment? Which societal, cultural, educational, religious, and economic factors influence their development? How do children impact their environment, and how does the environment impact children? Can sustainability in such relationships be “trained” and educated? Drawing on anthropological and psychological research on human-nature relationships and the transnational dimensions of education and learning, this talk zeroes in on the pathways of public education in Timor Leste. It focuses on the nation’s unique primary school curriculum, which is designed around the transnational concept of permaculture. The curriculum promotes children’s ecological, historical and cultural awareness and responsibility vis-à-vis postcolonial identity formation, citizenship and usage of the land.

Thomas Stodulka is Junior Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Freie Universität (FU) Berlin. He conducted long-term fieldwork with young men living on the street in Indonesia and has co-directed international research projects on the role of affect and emotion in ethnography, envy from a transcultural perspective, and critical perspectives on emotion research and big data. He is the co-founder of the European Network for Psychological Anthropology (ENPA) at the European Association of Social Anthropology. Since 2019, he has been associate editor of Ethos and editor of the Brill book series Social Sciences in Asia.

Katja Liebal is a comparative psychologist and biologist. After finishing her PhD on the cognitive foundations of great apes’ gestural communication at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, she worked as senior lecturer at the psychology department of Portsmouth University. In 2009, she joined the Excellence Cluster “Languages of Emotion” at the FU Berlin, where she currently works as Professor for Comparative Developmental Psychology. Her main research interests center on primate multimodal communication, prosocial behavior of children and nonhuman primates, and children’s attitudes towards other animals.

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