Rebecca Tarlau - Böcker

Over the past thirty-five years the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has become famous globally for its success in occupying land, winning land rights, and developing alternative economic enterprises for over a million landless workers. The movement has also linked education reform to its vision for agrarian reform by developing pedagogical practices for schools that foster activism, direct democracy, and collective forms of work. In Occupying Schools, Occupying Land, Rebecca Tarlau explores how MST activists have pressured municipalities, states, and the federal government to implement their educational program in public schools and universities, affecting hundreds of thousands of students. Contrary to the belief that movements cannot engage the state without demobilizing, Tarlau shows how educational institutions can help movements recruit new activists, diversify their membership, increase technical knowledge, and garner political power. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic field work, Tarlau documents how the MST operates in different regions working at times with or through the state, at other times outside it and despite it. She argues that activists are most effective using contentious co-governance, combining disruption and public protest with institutional pressure to defend and further their goals. Through an examination of the potentials, constraints, failures, and contradictions of the MST's educational struggle, Occupying Schools, Occupying Land offers insights into the relationship between education and social change, social movements and states, and the barriers and possibilities for similar reforms in democratic contexts throughout the world.

Winner of the 2020 ASA Sociology of Development Book AwardWinner of the 2020 APSA Michael Harrington Book Award Winner of the 2020 Comparative and International Education Society Globalization and Education Book Award Winner of the 2020 Latin American Studies Association Brazil Section Best Book Prize in the Social Sciences Winner of 2019 Robert Reis Best Book AwardOver the past thirty-five years the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has become famous for its success in occupying land, winning land rights, and developing alternative economic enterprises for over a million landless workers. In Occupying Schools, Occupying Land, Rebecca Tarlau explores how MST activists have pressured municipalities, states, and the federal government to implement their educational program in public schools and universities. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic field work, Tarlau documents how the MST operates in different regions. She argues that activists are most effective using contentious co-governance, combining disruption and public protest with institutional pressure to defend and further their goals. Through an examination of the potentials, constraints, failures, and contradictions of the MST's educational struggle, this book offers insights into the relationship between education and social change, social movements and states, and the barriers and possibilities for similar reforms in democratic contexts throughout the world.

Contradictions between impressive levels of economic growth and the persistence of poverty and inequality are perhaps nowhere more evident than in rural Brazil. While Brazil might appear to be an example of the potential harmony between large-scale, export-oriented agribusiness and small-scale family farming, high levels of rural resistance contradict this vision. In this volume, individual contributions from a variety of researchers across the field highlight seven key characteristics of contemporary Brazilian resistance that have broader resonance in the region and beyond: the growth of international networks, the changing structure of state–society collaboration, the deepening of territorial claims, the importance of autonomy, the development of alternative economies, continued opposition to dispossession, and struggles over the meaning of nature. By analyzing rural mobilization in Brazil, this collection offers a range of insights relevant to rural contention globally. Each contribution in this title increases our understanding of alternative agricultural production, large-scale development projects, education, race and political parties in the contemporary agrarian context. This book was previously published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.