Brazilian Landless Workers Movement Research Articles

Latin American Civil Resistance and Brazilian Landless Workers Movement: The Concept of Gandhian Nonviolence and Its Uses

Latin America and the Caribbean countries of a total of 33 countries spread over the southern longitude are great example of diversity. These countries are witness to many and many types of experience socially, economically and politically. Politically, these countries have gained many experiences from the historical point of view. It also includes the existence of violent and non-violent fight for political democracy. In some countries a fight also fought for social and economic justice in democracies. In the present article, the study of non-violent fighting in the mass movement in Latin America has been done. Apart from this, a special study has been done on the technology of landless workers’ movement of Brazil’s 1984, important in Latin American countries.in this article, this important and comprehensive mass movement has been studied from the perspective of Gandhi’s technic of movement.

Contentious Cogovernance and Prefiguration: A Framework for Analyzing Social Movement–State Relations in Public Education

This article offers a framework for analyzing social movement participation in public education through a focus on universities in Brazil. It builds on the literature on social movement–state relations, participatory governance, and community organizing in schools, drawing on the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the National Program for Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA) to illustrate the need to recenter the idea of conflict as a central and ongoing process of social movement participation in public schools and universities. The article also introduces the concept of prefiguration and highlights how students can prefigure in the formal public school system the types of social and economic practices they hope to build in the future. Contentious cogovernance and prefiguration are tools not only for improving educational equity but also for increasing the strength and internal capacity of social movements, paralleling the role Paulo Freire envisioned for nonformal popular education within grassroots organizations.

The Landless Workers Movement’s itinerant schools: occupying and transforming public education in Brazil

This article explores how social movement co-governance of public education offers an alternative to neoliberal educational models. The Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) is one of the largest social movements in Latin America. We describe one of the many schools that the MST co-governs, the Itinerant School Paths of Knowledge (Caminhos do Saber), located in an occupied encampment in the state of Paraná. We analyze three of the most unique pedagogical innovations in the school: the teacher’s incorporation of ‘portions of reality’ into classroom teaching, the student work collectives, and the participatory student evaluation process. Although these pedagogies are seemingly mundane changes to everyday school practice, we argue that they represent a challenge to the neoliberal educational model being implemented globally. These movement pedagogies are likely to continue, despite recent conservative attacks, and they offer several concrete lessons for how to effectively contest neoliberal educational practices in other global contexts.

Militância no Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST): um olhar psicanalítico

Resumo: Pretende-se trazer as contribuições da psicanálise para pensar a militância no Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) como práticas que ressignificam o passado e podem ser enriquecedoras para os sujeitos. Para tanto, apresentaremos as contribuições dos psicanalistas Arantes (1999) e Muldworf (2000) para o estudo da militância política e faremos uma breve caracterização do MST e de seus militantes. Destaca-se que a adesão a ideais sociais e lugar de prestígio que ocupa o militante no movimento lhe possibilita gratificação e revitalização narcísica e que estas não devem ser negligenciadas pelos movimentos sociais e nos estudos sobre a temática.

Between opportunities and threats – an analysis of Brazilian Landless Workers’ movement experiences with new media technologies

Recent discussions and research about the uses of digital social media platforms by social movements and protest organizations have raised questions about threats and challenges represented by these technologies. There is also a debate on whether digital social media platforms can contribute to establish and strengthen long-standing oppositional groups and structural change. In this context, this article analyses how the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) experiences and views the use of digital social media platforms in its communicative processes. Based on interviews and observations, the article shows how MST militants present ambivalent views towards platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and towards the dynamics of digital communication. Conclusions point that the main concern is threat to the organic collective character of the movement posed by individualistic digital social media platforms. Different from contemporary protest organisations, MST sees a clear separation between the movement and its media. The goal is to appropriate of and control media technologies, which brings many difficulties when dealing with digital social media platforms.

The Circumstantial Media Activist: An Analysis of the Relation between Media and Political Representation

Alternative or radical media are kinds of media production common among social movements whose members do not see their causes represented in mainstream media. This is the case of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), which since 1984 has created media outlets and produced content for different platforms, later becoming active in the area of media and communication rights in Brazil. Based on fieldwork carried out in 2013 and 2014, this article proposes that a perspective of communication rights is attentive to the structural configuration of the media landscape and not only to the provision of technology and production skills. This study shows that collective action and promotion of structural change are still relevant alongside new technologies.

Territorialidad cooperativa y campesina del Movimiento de los trabajadores rurales Sin Tierra (MST) de Brasil

En enero de 1984, en el municipio de Cascavel, situado en la región más occidental del estado de Paraná (Brasil), se constituyó formalmente el Movimiento de los trabajadores rurales Sin Tierra, el MST. Su relevancia geográfica, histórica, económica y social queda cristalizada en su dinámica de territorialización, protagonizada por los asentamientos de reforma agraria, las cooperativas de producción y comercialización, y sus agroindustrias, así como por sus escuelas de formación. Se potencia con todo ello la defensa y viabilidad de una agricultura familiar y campesina, asentada en la práctica de la agroecología. El devenir de este proceso conforma un fenómeno geográfico de extraordinaria magnitud hacia la producción de una alternativa social y espacial.

Education of the countryside at a crossroads: rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil

This contribution explores the strategies used by popular movements seeking to advance social reforms, and the challenges once they succeed. It analyzes how a strategic alliance between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG) transformed the Ministry of Education's official approach to rural schooling. This success illustrates the critical role of international allies, political openings, framing, coalitions and state–society alliances in national policy reforms. The paper also shows that once movements succeed in advancing social reforms, bureaucratic tendencies such as internal hierarchy, rapid expansion and ‘best practices’ – in addition to the constant threat of cooptation – can prevent their implementation.

Not-So-Public Contention: Movement Strategies, Regimes, and the Transformation of Public Institutions in Brazil

This article examines how political regimes structure the strategies activists can effectively utilize to transform public institutions. Drawing on Tilly's concept of "regime space" as a combination of capacity and democracy, the author analyzes the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement's (MST) attempt to implement alternative pedagogies in public schools in two diverse contexts: the state of Rio Grande do Sul and the municipality of Santa Maria da Boa Vista, Pernambuco. In Rio Grande do Sul's high-capacity democratic regime, social movement repertories and partisan politics are effective in transforming schools for a decade, until a right-leaning mobilization ends these initiatives. In contrast, in Santa Maria's low-capacity nondemocratic regime, the MST engages in a Gramscian war of position and transforms public schools over multiple administrations. This comparison illustrates the relevance of subnational regimes in shaping contention, the strengths and weaknesses of diverse activist strategies, and the importance of not-so-public forms of contention in movement outcomes.

Solidarity Economy and Agricultural Cooperatives: The Experience of the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement

Based on field research in southern Brazil, this paper examines successful experiences of encampment, and especially of two agricultural cooperatives of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) as part of the solidarity economy. These co-ops exemplified collective searches for better living conditions to respond to people's needs and hopes, beside and beyond the market economy. The paper thus explores (1) community dynamics and movement-building among MST participants as they interact with one another and are shaped by daily practices in their collective struggle for land access and justice; (2) how they foster alternative imaginaries (vision, hope, projects), forms of production, and social reproduction that nurture greater autonomy, solidarity, cooperation, and democratic participation; and (3) how various forms of cooperation allow MST participants to appropriate, defy and transform dominant norms and practices in their everyday lives. The latter process is crucial for researchers and activists interested in social change since these forces are contributing to opening up spaces that allow the emergence of new norms and values, intertwined with new practices and ways of being in the making, despite existing obstacles and challenges.

Agroecology and Radical Grassroots Movements' Evolving Moral Economies

I focus on the role of agroecology in rural proletarian social movements in this article. First, I highlight these movements' conception of agroecology as an important element of their political ideology. Second, I explore the value of agroecology in helping maintain the permanence of the peasantry. Third, I show that rural proletarian movements emphasize agroecology because it is key to attaining sovereignty. I draw upon the geographic lenses of territory, the production of space, and autonomous geographies in positing these arguments. Throughout the article, I draw upon a case study of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, one of the most vocal agroecological social movements, to illustrate these arguments.

The Social(ist) Pedagogies of the MST: Towards New Relations of Production in the Brazilian Countryside

This article explores the social(ist) pedagogies of the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), a large agrarian social movement that fights for socialism in the Brazilian countryside, meaning that workers own their own means of production and collectively produce the food and other products necessary for their communities’ survival. Over the past three decades, activists in the movement have developed an alternative educational proposal for rural schooling that supports these new social relations of production. Drawing on major theories of reproduction, cultural production, and resistance in the field of education, I argue that three theorists—Paul Willis, Paulo Freire, and Antonio Gramsci—are critical in assessing the role of schools in processes of social reproduction. I examine four components of the MST’s social(ist) pedagogy: the incorporation of manual labor into public schools; the promotion of collective learning; counter-cultural production; and linking schools to concrete political struggles. Drawing on Willis, Freire, and Gramsci, I argue that the MST’s educational proposal is a limited but real attempt to interrupt dominant social relations of production in the Brazilian countryside, thus representing a unique example of social pedagogy in the 21 century.

The local in the global: rethinking social movements in the new millennium

In this article we discuss the failure of social movement theories to adequately understand and theorize locally based, grassroots social movements like the landless workers movement in Brazil, ‘livability movements’ in third-world cities, and living wage movements in the USA. Movements such as these come to the attention of most social movement analysts only when the activists who participate in them come together in the streets of Seattle or international forums like the World Social Forum. To date, it is the transnational character of these protests that have excited the most attention. Building on scholarship that looks at the link between participatory democracy and social movements, this article takes a different tack. We show how some social movements have shifted their repertoire of practices from large mass events aimed at making demands on the national state to local-level capacity building. It is the local struggles, especially the ways in which they have created and used institutions in civil society through extending and deepening democracy, that may be the most significant aspect of recent social movements, both for our theories and for our societies. Yet these aspects have received less attention, we believe, because they are less well understood by dominant social movement theories, which tend to focus on high-profile protest events. We look at the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the Justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles to illustrate the important terrain of civil society as well as the role of community organizing.

Access to pre-natal care and cervical cancer prevention action among women from Brazilian Landless Workers Movement

This is a qualitative research that aimed to investigate Brazilian Landless Workers Movement women's access to pre-natal care and cervical cancer prevention. Interviews were done in 2005 with five women in the city of Cajamar, Brazil. The thematic analysis of content made it possible to evidence that access barriers such as territorial delimitation and geographical distance let women use false addresses as mechanisms to receive care. Pap smear tests were performed only during pregnancy. Health care provided for these women was fragmented and they received care solely because of their reproductive condition. Access to health services must be understood as continuous and complete assistance in all phases of a woman's life and they consist of a challenge to reach rural women. Improving access to information and education for these women corresponds to the possibility of exercising the universal right of access to health care based on the principle of equity.

Formação de professores na prática política do MST: a construção da consciência orgulhosa

Este artigo propõe-se a discutir a experiência de professores e professoras das escolas de assentamento organizadas pelo Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra -- MST, no oeste catarinense. Seguindo uma metodologia qualitativa, o estudo possibilitou a apreensão de aspectos significativos do universo cultural dos sujeitos, destacando as relações construídas na vida familiar, no desempenho da profissão e na participação política no Movimento. A análise da ação desenvolvida pelos professores nos diversos espaços de atuação vai revelando como eles se tornam sujeitos de sua experiência. A adesão às propostas educativas do MST possibilita a manifestação de uma identidade que fortalece a experiência cotidiana de ser professor, favorecendo o desenvolvimento de uma consciência orgulhosa da prática docente. A experiência é realimentada na escola e também nas instâncias educativas propiciadas pelo Movimento, nos contatos com o grupo de docentes, nos estudos que desenvolvem, nas trocas com os alunos e seus familiares. Isso possibilita aos professores estabelecer prioridades, acrescentando elementos significativos aos conteúdos escolares. Evidencia-se aí a perspectiva de veiculação, na escola, de uma dimensão do saber enriquecido pela ação política gerada nas práticas coletivas. Esse envolvimento resulta em experiências diferenciadas que se refletem nas ações desenvolvidas na escola e no Movimento. Com isso, esses professores reelaboram o espaço da escola no meio rural, criando novos compromissos que transformam sua atividade docente, ampliando seu aprendizado e as relações de solidariedade presentes na cultura do campo.