- Title
- "Stones One Day, Flowers the Next": The Struggle for Itinerant Schools in the Landless Workers Movement (MST), Brazil
- Creator
- Thapliyal, Nisha
- Relation
- Navigating Precarity in Educational Contexts Reflection, Pedagogy, and Activism for Change p. 191-207
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003258223-15
- Publisher
- Taylor & Francis
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2022
- Description
- The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) or Landless Workers Movement is a social movement of approximately 1.5 million landless peasants engaged in collective struggle for the right to land, education, and dignity. Between 1996 and 2009, an estimated 7,000 landless people (children and adults) participated in MST Escolas Itinerantes (itinerant schools) in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul (RGS). In this chapter, I argue that the educational struggles of the MST represent an instance where social movements can politicize and transform conditions of precarity in the domain of public education. The discussion is informed by a relational understanding of precarity as a term that can be used not only to denote the kinds of vulnerability created by marginal locations in the labor market but also to collectively mobilize people in these marginal locations to analyze the collective struggle for itinerant schools. This chapter is empirically grounded in a qualitative research study about the alternative educational project of the MST undertaken between 2005 and 2010. In their collective resistance to structurally imposed and stigmatized precarity, the MST has claimed not only the right to education but the right to imagine and enact their own liberatory educational project for the Brazilian landless.
- Subject
- social movement; Brazil; school; landless workers
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1465542
- Identifier
- uon:47300
- Identifier
- ISBN:97810006207331000620735
- Language
- eng
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- Visitors: 1891
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