Towards a political ecology of education: the educational politics of scale in southern Pará, Brazil

Abstract

Social movements have initiated both academic programs and disciplines. I present ethnographic data that I gathered during 17 months of fieldwork with the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in southeastern Pará, Brazil, to explore the MST’s role in creating agroecological education opportunities. My analysis highlights three factors in southeastern Pará that initiate environmental education opportunities. First, activist professors are key players, serving as mediators between the state and social movements. Second, recurring events incubate environmental educational institutions and degree programs. Third, by collaborating with institutionalized education, movements are able to develop their own radical educational spaces. These three factors result in a gradual anti-neoliberal transformation in southeastern Pará’s rural educational opportunities. I develop a theoretical perspective of the political ecology of education to understand the relations between these three factors and educational change. By drawing attention to the educational politics of scale, I help advance theories of environmental education in a neoliberal age.