[TimorLesteStudies] Fwd: For circulation: Geography Dept Seminar series

[Hannah Loney]

School of Geography Seminar Series: PhD Completion Seminar - Conservation
as Territoriality and Transitional Environmentality in Timor-Leste

Alexander Cullen, Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, University
of Melbourne



Tuesday 25 August 2015, 1pm-2pm

Theatre 2, basement, 221 Bouverie St, Carlton, University of Melbourne



Despite decades of critical attention, the geographical bounding of
indigenously managed areas for conservation continues to produce
controversial outcomes. Common experiences of such bounding include
diminished livelihood opportunities from resource exclusion and increases
in land conflicts. Contemporaneous with these are the reshaping of
community-state power relations that facilitate an institutional
penetration, or territorialisation of indigenous spaces. This talk explores
these themes in Timor-Leste, arguing the instigation of the first National
Park and the protected area network reflect attempts to integrate marginal
areas into the modern state apparatus. Undergirding the legitimacy of the
conservation program to drive this outcome are processes aiming to
(re)produce environmental citizens, discourses and behaviors, known as
envirionmentality.  Using comparative examples it is shown that such
processes in Timor-Leste are weakly executed, resulting in uneven social,
environmental, customary and political local costs that in effect unravel
the new eco-political subjectivities and identities the state seeks to
assemble. Reflecting on these concerns, contemporary understandings of
environmentality (as static or hegemonic) are challenged as deficient, in
lieu of new, nuanced examinations emphasizing the transitional and temporal
nature of the Timorese experience.  Doing so points to emerging future
opportunities of resistance and local articulations of environmental
sovereignty.

-- 
Alexander Cullen

PhD Candidate
University of Melbourne
Dept of Geography and Resource Management
+61 (03) 83449302
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