Abstract
Research on social movements in Brazil is a fruitful area that brings up debate and discussion about the ways in which marginalised and underrepresented sectors of society succeed in demanding and achieving rights. The most common research approaches include attempts to explain the action of such organisations, their protest repertoires as well as strategic and tactical perspectives developed by social movements. The question guiding this chapter is thus: How do these types of research contribute to make social movements’ demands visible in the public space, considering the contexts of inequality and criminalisation of social movements in Brazil? In this sense, the text problematises the relations between research and the objectives of social movements, centring on the case of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), the main organisation acting in the struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil. We do this by analysing how postgraduate programmes in Brazil relate to MST as subject of research, looking into approved master’s theses and doctoral dissertations in Brazilian universities during 2017.
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Notes
- 1.
Landless workers groups, organised in associations or unions, were active in Brazil since the 1960s, often working in clandestinity during the military dictatorship. With the end of the dictatorship, many such groups formed a nationwide organisation to demand agrarian reform, named Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra, Landless Rural Workers Movement, commonly called by the acronym MST.
- 2.
Other mobilisation forms were also used such as marches, hunger strikes and occupations of public buildings.
- 3.
Pronera is an educational programme for agrarian reform areas maintained by the Brazilian Federal Government and operationalised by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA in the Portuguese acronym). Its main goal is to facilitate access to all levels of education to youth and adults living in MST settlements and campsites (INCRA, 2016). In April 2019, César Augusto Gerken an army official with no specialisation in education was designated to coordinate the programme, causing general preoccupation among social movements regarding how the programme will be run and impending militarisation prospects (Hermanson, 2019).
- 4.
Translator’s note: quilombos were settlements formed by enslaved people of African origin in Brazil who succeeded in escaping slavery. Quilombos were also spaces for community organisation and resistance against slavery in Brazil. Many of these communities, usually located in remote rural areas, exist until today.
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Lima, M.S., Engelmann, S.I. (2020). Challenges for Social Movement Research in Contexts of Inequality: The MST in Brazil. In: Jeppesen, S., Sartoretto, P. (eds) Media Activist Research Ethics. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_4
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