British Academy Small Grant
2025
| Recognition Type | Fellowships and awards |
|---|---|
| Description | This project uses archival methods to explore the intellectual and political underpinnings of agricultural education in postwar Malaysia between 1945 and 1970. This is when agricultural education transformed from a tool of colonial expansion aimed at turning rainforests into productive land, to being simultaneously the pride of a new nation and an arm of U.S. and British Cold War interventions in Asia. These interventions were aimed at simultaneously shaping minds and ecologies, meaning agricultural education offers a unique microcosm of the ideas about the political, the psychological, and the scientific. This project therefore asks: what were the models of mind and ecology that underlay colonial and postcolonial efforts at educating Malaysian farmers and planters? This begs a broader question: how might the simultaneous molding of both minds and ecologies have been used for political ends in postcolonial contexts? And what were the cracks and omissions in these seemingly totalizing agendas? |