This text discusses some results from research on the formation of agroecological networks and subjects in traditional rural communities in the Center-South and Campos Gerais regions of Paraná state. We begin from the discussion of agroecology as a field for social production of knowledge and practices, through which cooperation strategies, disputes, and tensions between different actors at local, regional, and national scales become evident. To do so, three dimensions that mobilize resources and expand capacities for a relative socio-environmental autonomy that theoretically could be driven by agroecological projects are discussed: organizational, epistemological, and technological. A wide variety of social strategies for appropriating, producing, and legitimizing agroecological discourses and practices that reveal territorialization strategies for multiple motives (local social organizations, universities, unions and cooperatives, municipal, state, and federal government) can be seen. Notable among the competing agroecological imagery is that which resembles an ethics of peasantry and traditional knowledge, often diverging from the official scientific and institutional hegemonic beliefs in some aspects with regard to the autonomy of the three dimensions mentioned above. On these terms, we question to what extent various agroecological practices and imagery can mobilize social and ecological capital when appropriated (adapted and hybridized) by local rural communities in order to produce subjectivities and autonomies based on an ethics of peasantry.elocation-id: e2230103Received: 08.24.2021 • Accepted: 02.04.2022 • Published: 02.23.2022Original article / Blind peer review / Open access