ECOMUNITIES. Utopia, community and ecological alternatives. The return to the countryside in Portuguese-speaking countries

 

HISTAGRA-CISPAC researcher Luis Toledo Machado has created a website, with the support of the Xunta de Galicia, which seeks to rethink the formation of rural ecological communities in the Lusophone space between the 1960s and 1980s, focusing on the transnational exchanges that had facilitated the circulation of these practices and on the changes that these utopian initiatives had generated in the way of conceiving the relationship between human beings and nature.

 

With https://ecomunidades.hypotheses.org/ we will be able to analyse the formation of alternative rural communities in the Lusophone countryside between the 1960s and 1980s. In addition to including a linguistic-cultural area hitherto absent in studies on the subject, it examines the importance of the rural world for modern utopianism and the changes in the conception of human beings and nature that these initiatives generated. It consists of several phases. In the first phase (2024-2027), research will be carried out in three case studies: Brazil, Portugal and Galicia, together with a pilot phase of a Service-Learning (SL) project. 
 

‘Utopia, community and ecological alternatives. La vuelta al campo en la Lusofonía atlántica’ (ECOMUNIDADES) is the postdoctoral project developed by Luis Toledo Machado (CISPAC, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela) under the support of the Ayudas de apoyo a la etapa de formación posdoctoral de la Xunta de Galicia 2024 and under the supervision of Lourenzo Fernández Prieto (USC).

 

Based on the principles of Open Science, the website will progressively incorporate various research tools and updated information on the development of the project. Currently, it has a collaborative map with more than 100 communities in Brazil that allows new entries to be added by the inhabitants of these initiatives, specialists and interested people.