Transforming space and society? The political ecology of education in the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s Jornada de Agroecología

Abstract

The occupation of space is a key geographic tactic for social movements. In this article, we explore how movements’ explicit and everyday occupation of space exists along a continuum. Taken together, these occupations can function as part of a broader strategy of creating dialogic spaces for environmental knowledge production. Dialogic spaces have an educational function, and are intended to provoke critical dialogue and transformation within society. Drawing upon a political ecology of education framework, we show that these dialogic spaces are strategically occupied to help transform both material and immaterial territories. We evidence this argument by analyzing the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement’s (MST) Jornada de Agroecology (agroecological journey), which is a social movement meeting. Drawing upon data collected at the 2012 Jornada, we argue that the Jornada’s disparate spatial forms are part of a broader journey related to transforming not only space, but also what constitutes agroecology.

Keywords

Political ecology of education Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)agroecology dialogic space convergence diálogo de saberes

Introduction

The occupation of space is an integral element of social movements’ tactics and larger strategies of resistance (Hayes, 2006; Juris, 2012; St. John, 2008; Wall, 1999).¹ Tactics are specific tools—consisting of resources and actions—which movements coordinate to achieve their broader political strategies (Routledge, 1996: 525). Resistance strategies are fluid; just as movements’ opponents are constantly shifting, invoking new forms of repression, so too must popular forces remain adaptable, reconfiguring in counterpoint as a process of movement “within and between different forms and tactics” (Routledge, 1996: 526). An analysis of a social movement’s shifting tactics, and larger strategies, in response to changes in the political landscape affords insights into the relationship between spatiality of resistance, and social change.

Spatial analyses of movements’ occupations require a temporal component, as the spatial and temporal are inextricably linked (Dodghson, 2008; Harvey, 1990; Pred, 1981; Thrift, 1977; but see Merriman, 2012). There are three dominant approaches to understanding the relation between the spatial and temporal aspects of social movement occupations. The first emphasizes the occupation of space as an explicit break that occurs during moments of heightened emotion (Merrifield, 2002). Movement scholars term these moments a phase of “heightened conflict” (Tarrow, 1998) or a “transformative event” (McAdam and Sewell, 2001). Blockades and sit-ins typify these explosive occupations (Harley, 2014). From the second approach, occupation is an everyday process of reconstructing space and social relations (Auyero, 2004; Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010a). The mundane organizing that is required to maintain autonomous infoshops exemplifies this everyday activism (Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010b). Within the third conception, the ruptural and everyday occupations of space are not distinct (Fernandes, 2000; Halvorsen, 2014; Routledge, 1996). Seen through this lens, social movement actions do not take place in independent time-spaces, but are rather hybrid. Theorizing the spatiotemporal nature of these interconnected spaces, social movements are fluid geographic processes that are not fixed in time (Routledge, 1996: 519).

Movements’ spatial occupations are frequently part of a broader strategy of advancing popular education. Social movements have prioritized the production of educational spaces, ranging from the Highlander Center in Tennessee (Morris, 1984), to Black Panther schools in Oakland (Payne and Strickland, 2008), to workers’ colleges (Altenbaugh, 1990). Movement strategically prioritizes education, because the politics of knowledge are central to their goals of social change. Changes in the geography of social movements’ educational spaces frequently track movements’ changing positions in relation to the state. Following Routledge,

this siting of social movements in relation to the practices of everyday life and the socio-political processes of the state is one of perpetual movement, negotiation, changing alliances and affinities, cooptions and infiltrations, contingent upon particular spatio-temporal conditions. Within this perpetual movement, social movements are located within a contested web of power and knowledge relations. (1996: 511)

Due to changing political contexts and relationships with the state, movements need to remain spatially nimble, shifting back-and-forth along the tactical continuum of occupation, which consists of interconnected explicit and everyday forms.

In this article, we analyze how the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST) utilizes interrelated forms of spatial occupations as part of a broader geographic strategy of creating dialogic spaces. Dialogic spaces have an educational function, involve critical forms of communication between social movements and society, and are intended to advance emancipatory social change (Rule, 2004). The MST is the largest agrarian reform movement in Latin America, and is known for its tactical usage of land occupations, and mobilizations around critical forms of education and environmental knowledge (Branford and Rocha, 2002; Meek, 2015). We argue that the MST creates dialogic spaces as part of a strategy intended to transform both land and knowledge.

To explore how dialogic spaces function strategically, we focus on the spatial shifts within the movement’s Jornada de Agrecologia, an annual regional conference that is used to promote agroecological knowledge and practice. In the early-mid 2000s, the Jornadas involved direct struggles with international agribusiness over space.² However, times and tactics have changed. Since the mid-2000s, the Jornada’s brazen occupations have lost much of their political immediacy and effectiveness. Currently, the Jornada still involves occupations, but ones that are everyday and institutionalized. The Jornada’s spatial transition tracks a larger one within the MST as a whole whose land occupations have declined extensively since the mid-2000s.³ The core of our argument is that these different spatial forms occupation produce a diversity of educational spaces. These spaces can be differentiated based upon the degree of dialogue that occurs within them. Although the MST’s characteristic explicit occupations are decreasing, its everyday ones have potentially more capacity to effect systemic change in agroecological knowledge and practice.

A political ecology of education framework provides perspective on how political context, ideology, and political economic processes structure these occupied spaces, and the forms of environmental knowledge and agricultural practices they produce. The political ecology of education (PEoE) can be defined as a framework for understanding “how the reciprocal relations between political economic forces influence pedagogical opportunities—from tacit to formal learning—affecting the production, dissemination, and contestation of environmental knowledge at various interconnected scales (Meek 2015: 10).” Employing the PEoE perspective, we analyze how occupations related to the MST’s Jornada de Agroecología are part of a broader strategy of creating dialogic spaces.

The article proceeds in the following fashion. First, we integrate theoretical insights from political and agrarian geography to argue that tactical occupations, of both the everyday and explicit variety, are continuous elements of a broader strategy of creating dialogic spaces. Following this, we analyze the MST’s Jornada de Agroecología. We draw upon data that Meek collected during an event ethnography of the MST’s 11th Jornada, which took place between 11 and 14 July 2012.⁴ Meek conducted participant observation of the various workshops, plenaries, and its biodiversity fair during this event ethnography (Brosius and Campbell, 2010). Meek collected data through interviews with both rank-and-file MST participants as well as long-term Jornada organizers concerning the history of the Jornada, and its political impact.

Transforming space within the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement

Occupying land and knowledge

Since the early 1980s, the Brazilian Landless Workers’ Movement has been using tactical land occupations to advance agrarian reform (Branford and Rocha, 2002). The MST has helped 350,000 landless families secure land rights through occupations of large, unproductive estates. Currently, there are thousands of landless families across Brazil living on occupied lands in MST encampments, pressuring the government to give them the rights to farm this land.⁵

The MST’s occupation of space is one of its characteristic tactics. MST members seize what they argue is unused agricultural land and create a temporary encampment. By squatting, they pressure the government to expropriate the land, and create a formalized agrarian reform settlement. This territorial tactic has tended to work fairly well for the MST because the Brazilian constitution states that land needs to have a socially productive function, or the government can take it (Wolford, 2010). Since the movement’s origination in the early 1980s, MST members have occupied land in 24 out of 27 states in Brazil. Between 2000 and 2012, the MST carried out 2781 occupations involving 452,681 families (DATALUTA, 2013: 30).

The MST occupies rural space because land has historically been highly concentrated in Brazil (Foweraker, 1981). The inequitable spatial concentration of land dates back to Portuguese land entitlements, but is perpetuated by neoliberal policies, and more recently by land grabs (Novo et al., 2010; Wilkinson and Herrera, 2010). Through its occupations, the MST seeks to transform this inequitable distribution of land (Wolford, 2005). The MST argues that the creation of an agrarian reform settlement for the marginalized landless is a more socially and environmentally just usage of rural space.

Educational and agrarian reform are interlinked within the MST’s ideology and spatial tactics. Brazil’s geographic disparity in education provision is similar to its historically inequitable distribution of land (Plank, 1987). The political economy of education financing in Brazil has traditionally been directed towards supporting urban centers. Rural municipalities in the country’s impoverished north and northeast historically received a sixth of the resources as those in the urban south (Gadotti, 1992). The Brazilian ruling class has governed both land and education towards a dual set of aims: maintaining a consolidated agrarian structure, and an educational system that explicitly valorizes urban areas. These objectives are interrelated as they preserve agroindustrial capitalism while shifting the peasantry to urban areas where they will not be a threat. However, movements have created fractures in this larger project.

The MST and other rural social movements, such as the National Confederation of Agricultural Workers (Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura – or CONTAG), have advanced an educational reform movement and pedagogy known as Educação do Campo (Education of the Countryside). Munarim (2008) argues that the Educação do Campo movement is a product of both the MST’s accumulated alternative pedagogical experiences in encampments and settlements, as well as its ongoing struggle for basic rights, dignity. As a pedagogy, educação do campo emphasizes the value of alternative forms of knowledges, the importance of agrarian reform communities as learning laboratories, and critical place-based research. This reform movement has begun transforming both the rural educational landscape and governmental policies.⁶ One national-level policy advanced by the Educação do Campo movement is the National Program of Education in Areas of Agrarian Reform (PRONERA). This program provides funding for the Educação do Campo movement’s alternative education initiatives. For example, between 1998 and 2011, PRONERA offered 320 courses, ranging from the levels of literacy training and high-school to higher education, involving 82 different educational institutions, and providing services to 164,898 students living in agrarian reform areas (IPEA, 2015). The spatial manifestations of the broader Educação do Campo movement are diverse, ranging from formalized courses in universities to non-formal pedagogical encampments. The Jornada de Agroecología exemplifies the diverse spatial landscape of this education reform movement. I now analyze three different perspectives on the spatiality of the MST’s occupations.

Three views on occupation

Occupation as rupture

One way to understand the MST’s occupation of space from a social movement studies perspective is as a moment of rupture. Sebastião Salagdo’s exquisite photographs of thousands of MST members breaking through a fence to claim land exemplify what McAdam and Sewell (2001) term “transformative events” and Tarrow (1998) calls moments of “heightened conflict”.⁷ “These moments erupt when the ‘excess of life’ cannot be contained anymore, and lead to ruptures such as the taking of space” (Halvorsen, 2014: 3).

In addition to land, MST’s members also engage in the spectacular occupation of other spaces, ranging from roads, and railways, to governmental offices, such as those of the Secretary of Education and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA). They frequently seize these spaces after their initial demand for land has been met to press for the creation of infrastructure, and the delivery of broader social services, such as education (Wolford, 2010). MST members will occupy these diverse spaces in highly symbolic ways to communicate their demands.

MST members have taken over and transformed major roads into temporary schools as a tactic of resistance, highlighting the links between education and agrarian reform. Several times in 2006 and 2007, MST members from a settlement in the southeastern Amazon occupied a highway, transforming it into a makeshift two-lane classroom with teachers, pupils, desks, chairs and a blackboard.⁸ The MST’s transformation of the road into a classroom exemplifies what Tilly (2000) terms the symbolic geography of contentious politics. The symbolic geography of social movements includes the “use of emblematic monuments, locales, or buildings in dramatization of demands …” (Tilly, 2000: 137). Movements, such as the MST, occupy particular spaces because of their symbolic value, as “locations carry meanings, and those meanings can telegraph the message that the movement wants to convey” (Hammond, 2013: 501).

Occupation as everyday

An alternative optic for understanding the MST’s occupation of space is the concept of everyday resistance. Scholars describe everyday resistance as the “mundane, ordinary practices of activism that both sustain and drive social movements” (Halvorsen, 2014: 4). Activism in these spaces might seem mundane and messy, consisting of consensus-based meetings or managing autonomous infoshops; however, it is these quotidian geographies of resistance through which activists construct “futures in the present” (Cleaver, 1979). The geography of daily resistance in MST encampments shares many similarities with Sitrin’s (2012) account of Argentine social movements that arose following the fiscal default of 2001. These Argentine movements engaged in factory occupations, providing an arena in which to forge new social relations, including experiments with neighborhood self-management. Like this Argentine example, MST encampments can be seen as occupied spaces in which new social relations are forged. These spaces in many ways represent “practical experiments in new forms of life” in which “there is a real sense of subversive energy, freedom and possibility” (Free Association, 2011: 33). The MST moves closer towards its socialist ideal of building a new society based on cooperative relations through the everyday advancement of new forms of social organization and production in these spaces (Diniz and Gilbert, 2013). MST members would likely agree with an adapted version of Halvorsen’s perspective that the encampment “rather than simply being a moment of rupture, is an ongoing set of everyday practices through which the transition to post-capitalist worlds takes place (2014: 5).”

Occupation as continuum

Brazilian agrarian geographers have developed a third lens through which the MST’s occupations, and the movement itself, are visualized as a multiplicity of spatiotemporally interconnected occupations. Geographer Bernardo Mançano Fernandes argues that the MST is a socioterritorial movement, because its tactical occupations are not independent spatial forms, but rather geographic processes. These spatial processes transform not only agrarian structures but also social relations (Fernandes, 2000: 61). Seeing occupations as territorial processes is instructive for two reasons. First, it rescales the analysis from individual occupations, to the interconnections between these spaces. Second, it illuminates the linkage between learning and subsequent occupations. As Fernandes (2000) argues, “the experience of occupation, as part of the territorial process, is a form of learning” (73). Fernandes details how within the MST, knowledge of how to carry out occupations is transmitted through the exchange of experiences, and discussion of “reference struggles” (lutas de referências), which share similar circumstances. Through this processes of learning, new encampments sprout from the original, and spread across the landscape, forming “a continuum of spatialization and territorialization” (Fernandes, 2000: 73). Comprising this larger territorial continuum, MST members combine various forms of spatial struggle, such as the marches, occupations of government buildings, and rail lines. Fernandes’ analysis of occupied space as multiple, fluid, and processual tracks Routledege’s (1996) concept of terrains of resistance.

Terrains of resistance, for Routledge are “the sites of contestation and the multiplicity of relations between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic powers and discourses, between forces and relations of domination, subjection, exploitation and resistance” (1996: 515). Similar to Fernandes’ focus on spatiotemporally interconnected occupations, Routledge argues that in a terrain of resistance,

the boundaries of a social movement can be spurious; there is no clear division between past, present and future practices. Social movements in particular, and resistances in general, may be theorized as multiplicities of interactions, relations, and acts of becoming-a ceaseless process of struggle, confrontations and transformations. (1996: 516)

Also tracking Fernandes’ conception of the occupation as a communicative space of learning, “terrains of resistance, then, are assembled out of the materials, practices, becomings and knowledges of everyday life. They embody the tactical, strategic and symbolic processes involved in making the world” (Routledge, 1996: 517). Fernandes’ later writings (2005) suggest that terrains of resistance might be best described by their specific compositionality (composicionalidade), which refers to all of their various dimensions. For example, we see compositionality present in Routledge’s (1996) argument that “terrains of resistance are manifested in myriad ‘spaces’, none of which are closed or ‘contain’ social movements. Rather, these spaces are intermingled with one another in a multiplicity of configurations” (517). Synthesizing the perspectives of Fernandes (2000, 2005) and Routledge (1996) highlights how movements’ occupations—while spatiotemporally disparate—are in reality interconnected spaces. What connects these spaces in part is the geographic process of learning and communication.

Immaterial and material territory

We will now explore how the occupation of land is related to the transformation of knowledge. Fernandes’ (2009, 2013) description of the interconnections between material and immaterial territory provides a nuanced lens to understand the interconnections between occupations and the politics of knowledge. Material territory constitutes physical features, such as mountains, rivers, landforms as well as infrastructure. Immaterial territory, by contrast, is the landscape of ideas. Controlling immaterial territory results in the domination of the process of knowledge construction and its interpretations (Fernandes, 2013: 183). It determines the usage of territory, and cognitively, how we make sense of and organize the world. Material and immaterial territories form a whole; “material production is not realized on its own, but through the direct relation to immaterial production. Likewise, immaterial production only makes sense in the realization and understanding of material production” (Fernandes, 2013: 182, our translation). The MST’s occupations are not just transformation of land as a material resource, but also of the ideology and practices that are infused within that landscape. The following ethnographic example, drawn from Meek’s ongoing research on the MST’s agroecological education initiatives in the state of Pará, evidences the two arguments we have put forth so far: that the MST’s occupations are spatiotemporally continuous, and that the transformations of material and immaterial territory are intertwined.

Surreal is the only way to describe the MST settlement known as Luís Carlos Prestes. Unlike most agrarian reform settlements in the region, which are accessed by rutted dirt roads, one enters Luís Carlos Prestes via a professionally constructed cobble stone drive, the old fazendeiro’s (plantation owner’s) drive.

A handful of thatched shelters are interspersed among the original buildings of what was the fazendeiro’s headquarters, and is now the MST’s Center for Study and Training in Agroecology and Cabana Culture (Centro de Estudos e Formação em Agroecología e Cultura Cabana or CEFAC). CEFAC consists of the original three buildings that made up the fazendeiro’s headquarters: a glassed-in, air-conditioned wooden pavilion constructed of massive timbers, a house with an industrial kitchen, and an office building. MST members have completely refashioned the complex to serve as an agroecological education space. They have transformed the house into a dormitory for visiting MST students. The office building is now a space for group discussions. The pool is now a fishpond that provides food for the students. The glassed-in pavilion, which previously was a site for social functions, is now CEFAC’s auditorium.

I am at CEFAC for the graduation ceremony of its first cohort in agroecology and rural culture. As I sit waiting for the beginning of the ceremony, the surreal nature of the situation causes a strange anxiety in me. It feels like I, and the 23 students, and their 50 family members are all in a place where we simply do not belong. Perhaps at any moment the fazendeiro will arrive back and find his parlor occupied by school desks, his heavy wooden bar cloaked in red MST flags and adorned with pictures of Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemborg and other revolutionaries. But he will not return tonight, the interwoven material and immaterial spaces have been transformed.

Joaquim takes the podium to address the gathered students and families. “This was the latifiundio’s space, but it is now one of the construction of knowledge, and of wisdom—of knowledge that comes from us, not of knowledge that simply come from the universities. This space is a reaffirmation of our values, which are different. Why are we studying agroecology? Because the planet doesn't have more time. Because the agroindustrial model does not, and will not work. Because, we need an educational space that reaffirms our Cabana culture. And we discovered here that that agroecology is our culture”.

This vignette ethnographically illustrates how movement occupations can exist as spatiotemporal continuums, and ultimately transform interlinked material and immaterial territories. If successful, occupied spaces, which start as encampments, can be legalized as settlements, thus providing a continuity between the immediate struggle for land in the occupation and the longer-term struggle on the land once the settlement is created. Additionally, by converting the fazendeiro’s complex into an agroecological school, the MST members transform not only the material territory and its historical land usage, but the territory of ideas upon which this land use is based. The process of knowledge construction is therefore part and parcel of a broader form of territorial dispute. While Fernandes’ description of material and immaterial territory is important for analyzing the transformation of particular spaces, such as CEFAC, we need one last optic to analyze how social movement’s interconnected occupations can potentially influence the broader production of environmental knowledge within larger society.

Dialogic space

The concept of dialogic space—when taken together with the previous theoretical arguments—enables an analysis how the MST’s myriad spaces of occupation create critical dialogue between different sectors of society potentially leading to the transformation of material and immaterial territories. Dialogic spaces are defined by having an intended educational objective, and encouraging critical dialogue between social movements and different sectors of society with the ultimate goal of actualizing emancipatory social change (Rule, 2004).

The notion of dialogue as a force for learning has a long tradition both in Western philosophical history and in the global South. From its roots in classical Greek philosophy—where the Socratic dialogue was a method towards developing knowledge—it has also served as an integral part of Continental philosophical thought, as exemplified by Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action (1972), Buber's “life of dialogue” (1964) and Mikhail Bakhtin’s “authentic being” (1981). Etymologically, dialogue has a connotation of ‘difference', owing to its prefix dia, meaning ‘apart'. While individuals are separate, through dialogue they are brought together. In this article, we follow Rule (2004), whose concept of dialogic space draws upon a vision of dialogue as transformative and based in everyday reality. Dialogue, in these spaces, consists of what Brazilian critical pedagogue Paulo Freire terms “praxis—in action and reflection—in political engagement, in the pledge for social transformation” (Gadotti, 1996: xi). Rule characterizes dialogic spaces as effecting larger society through debates regarding the nature of society.

The first half of this article has made a theoretical case for how occupied space transform knowledge, practice, and ultimately the landscape itself. We now explore the Jornada as an extended example of this in practice. The diverse forms of occupation that comprise the Jornada, ranging from the emblematic occupations of land to the more quotidian transformations of institutional spaces, are part of the MST’s broader political strategy of creating dialogic space, which seeks to usher in changes in material and immaterial territory.

The Jornada de Agroecología

The various definitions of the word ‘jornada’ help illuminate what the MST signifies in its employment of the term. In colloquial Brazilian Portuguese, Jornada is used to mean a short hike, a journey, a military expedition, a battle, or an encounter (http://www.dicionarioinformal.com.br/jornada/). We believe that three of these usages—encounter, battle, and journey—are simultaneously invoked in the MST’s Jornada de Agroecología. These are not simply three definitional aspects, but rather interrelated spatial registers. We argue that a different type of communication characterizes each of these spatial forms, and that these differences structure the potential for practices of learning. We first highlight the different pedagogical functions, and then provide a more detailed account of the Jornada in each of these three senses.

The Jornada de Agroecología is a series of encounters (encontros). These generally annual state-level meetings draw between 4 and 6000 participants. Currently, the overwhelming majority of the participants (>90%) are from the MST.⁹ In addition to these social movement activists, the majority of other participants are agricultural extension agents (mostly from the Empresa de Assistência Técnica e Extensão Rural or EMATER) who lead many of the workshops. These meetings consist of scores of hands-on workshops on agroecology, plenary discussions with movement intellectuals and high-ranking politicians, as well as marches. The Jornada de Agroecología was first held in 2002 in Ponta Grossa, Paraná and was the product of a partnership between various social movements, NGOs, and governmental bodies. In addition to its annual occurrences in Ponta Grossa (2002–2004), it has also taken place in Cascavel (2005–2008), Francisco Beltrão (2009–2010), Londrina (2011–2012), and most recently Maringá (2013–2015).

As an encounter, the Jornada is fairly similar to what Routledge (2000) calls a convergence space, or a “heterogenous affinity of common ground between resistance formations where in certain interests, goals, tactics, and strategies converge … it is a space of facilitation, solidarity, communication, coordination, and information sharing” (25). While the communicative function of convergence spaces is certainly relevant to an analysis of these meetings, I argue that the Jornadas might be better conceived of as dialogic spaces, because they involve the encounter between different epistemologies. They function pedagogically as a diálogo de saberes (DS), which is roughly translated as “dialogue among different knowledges and ways of knowing” (Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2014: 2). DS are frequently used within Latin American grassroots movements as a method of agroecological education (Leff, 2004; Tardin, 2006). This pedagogical technique, which is based upon the insights of Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Friere, involves bringing peasants and extension agents into dialogue as educational subjects, where the traditional peasant forms of knowledge are brought into conversation with academic knowledge as part of a synthesis of knowledges, new practices and social relations (Freire, 1973).

From a second perspective, the Jornada has historically taken the form of a battle. At several points, it employed spatial occupations in a frontal assault against transnational agribusiness—a series of confrontations that had grave consequences for MST activists. These explicit occupations, which occurred directly following the Jornada in 2003 and 2006, may be considered dialogic spaces for two reasons. First, they have each created specific material spaces for agroecological education. As we will subsequently describe in greater detail, each occupation involved the creation of alternative educational institutions, as well as the destruction of transgenic agricultural crops. We argue that these occupations are therefore similar to the earlier example of CEFAC, and involve the dual transformation of material and immaterial territory. Second, following Pellegrini (2009), these may be considered dialogic because they are highly symbolic actions, which seek to help create a dialogue between the movement and broader society about agribusiness, genetically modified organisms, and agroecology.

In a third sense, the Jornada is a collective journey. Its organizers describe the Jornada de Agroecología as a “social process of movement”, which critiques agribusiness and advances agroecology among both its participants and the larger society. The Jornada seeks to usher in the agroecological transition by creating dialogue between different forms of knowledge and practice, advocating for public policies directed towards the prohibition of transgenics, and limits on pesticides. The Jornada takes on significance as a journey when one scales out from the individual actor, or the particular space, and sees it as a geographic process.

Spaces of encounter, battle, and journey are three interrelated forms of occupation. The MST uses these spatial forms to create a broader dialogue within society about the unsustainability of agribusiness, and the transformative potential of agroecology. We will now explore the Jornada in each of its three spatial registers, highlighting how these spatial forms differentially enable different forms of education.

Journey as Battle

Early on, the Jornada challenged transnational agribusiness by engaging in the direct occupation of agricultural research facilities and destruction of experimental test plots. Following the 2003 Jornada, 600 MST activists occupied a Monsanto farm in Ponta Grossa (where the 2nd Jornada took place) to denounce the entry of transgenics into Paraná, Monsanto’s research on transgenics, and the company’s environmental crimes. The Jornada’s activists destroyed one of Monsanto’s transgenic experimental agriculture plots. Six days later, the MST activists returned in larger numbers and set up an encampment. These MST members held their occupation of this Monsanto site for one year. On 15 May 2004, during the closing ceremonies of the MST’s 3rd Jornada, its participants rechristened the seized Monsanto territory the “Chico Mendes Center for Agroecology”. As part of this center, they began amassing and reproducing traditional seeds, and engaging in agroecological education (http://www.brasildefato.com.br/node/708). Monsanto ultimately withdrew its experimental center from Ponta Grosso.

The Jornada’s occupation of the Monsanto site exemplifies how explicit occupations can serve as dialogic spaces, refiguring material and territories. For Pellegrini, the occupation of Monsanto reflected a

break in the movements’ mode of public intervention. Until then, the MST occupied unproductive fields and made them productive. That way, it could settle peasant families while publicly demonstrating the importance of land distribution. But in occupying biotechnology corporations the MST’s logic of public intervention has changed … (2009: 57)

The Monsanto action symbolized a tactical change, according to Pellegrini, because it used the occupation of space to open up a broader dialogue within Brazilian society about the role that agribusiness and modern technology play in the exploitation of natural resources, and incursion of national sovereignty.^10,11 This action highlights how spaces for agroecological education can influence the transformation of material and immaterial territories. MST members began transforming the site’s material territory through the creation of agroecological experimental plots, and immaterial territory through the dissemination of agroecological knowledge in the Chico Mendes center.

The Jornada continued to function as a battleground in the mid-2000s. In March 2006, as part of the 5th Jornada, the MST occupied an experimental agricultural field of the Swiss corporation Syngenta in Santa Teresa do Oeste, Paraná. Syngenta had illegally planted 12 hectares of GMO soy within the protective boundary zone of Iguaçu national park. As part of their occupation, the MST members renamed the space ‘Terra Livre’. Similar to Fernandes’ account of referential struggles, the activists drew upon the Jornada’s previous tactic of creating agroecological education spaces as a way of reconfiguring material and immaterial territories. They inverted the symbolic geography of the space by planting 6000 tree saplings, and starting the process of creating an agroecological school on the captured land.¹² This victory was, however, short-lived. After having successfully occupied it for 16 months, in 2007, 70 MST families were evicted from the site. In a continuation of the drama, in the early morning of 21 October 2007, 150 MST peasants re-occupied the Syngenta site. A microbus of armed gunmen arrived on the site later that afternoon and opened fire, killing one activist and wounding six others (La Via Campesina, 2007; Newell, 2008).

The Jornada’s transformation of the Monsanto and Syngenta sites is important for critically exploring the larger effect that explicit occupations have in raising consciousness among society about transgenics and agroecological alternatives. Returning to Pellegrini (2009), “as the MST occupies fields and research centers belonging to biotechnology corporations it becomes visible to the cities, its discourse gets heard, its mode of production is taken into account and its problems take on new relevance” (58). We believe these explicit occupations were intended to function strategically as dialogic spaces, because they involved the construction of educational centers, and sought to open a wider dialogue within society concerning the unsustainability of agribusiness and the viability of peasant agroecological systems. However, one must remain critical of whether these dialogic spaces are actually producing what the MST envisions as transformative dialogue. Too often, the Brazilian media has maligned the MST. Brazilian scholars argue that this negative framing exemplifies the ways in which the country’s largely monopolized Globo media network reproduces the interests of capital and agribusiness (Baccega and Citelli, 1989; Marambaia and Cimara, 2000; Voese, 1998). Additionally, the specter of violence dominates coverage of the movement (Berger, 1998). The media portray MST members—wielding sickles and machetes while destroying private property—as the “source and origin of violence … to create fear and insecurity in public opinion” (Gohn, 2000: 24). While not all media coverage is negative (Hammond, 2004), it is doubtful that the MST’s highly symbolic occupations of Monsanto and Syngenta created a meaningful dialogue within larger society about agroecology. More likely, these actions were perceived as diatribe or what Buber (1964: 4) terms “monologue disguised as dialogue”, which does not contain the inner intent of acknowledging the validity in other perspectives, and involves not a relationship between equals, but asymmetrical power relationships. Given the diversity of spatial forms of the Jornada, it is necessary to ask: how do different forms of space matter to a political ecology of education in the MST? We argue that these symbolic occupations fall short of advancing the larger strategy of dialogic space. By directly contesting what is perceived as sacrosanct—the inviolability of private property and assumed progress of technology—they end up exemplifying what Bakhtin (1984: 292) terms monologism, which ‘at its extreme, denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities’. Politically, these spaces preclude dialogue. As a result, broader society learns little, and these spaces fall short of their broader transformative potential.

Victories … but at what cost?

The Jornada’s tactic of confrontational occupations produced mixed results. Francisco, one of the Jornada’s organizers, felt that the “the Jornada has had an extraordinary importance in terms of impacting the society, and affecting the political and economic interests of agribusiness”. However, he recognized that “while we’ve achieved all of this, we’ve also had our defeats.” Francisco described the temporary victories at Monsanto and Syngenta as very “expensive” for the movement, resulting in the assassination of one activist, and the severe wounding of several others. Additionally, its usage of direct action severely strained relations with some of the Jornada’s constitutive groups. As Francisco continued:

After the occupation of SYNGENTA, many organizations that considered themselves allies of La Via Campesina (LVC) pulled away from the process. The Jornada increasingly became almost exclusively associated with the organizations that are part of LVC. The Jornada was still able to bring in other groups, like professional associations, those from the university, from other research institutions, the student movements. But a large portion of the original organizations permanently left the Jornada because their vision of agroecology didn't involve the confrontation of agribusiness. The direct confrontation they just wouldn't support.

As Cumbers et al. (2008) indicate, geographical “faultlines” are natural in convergence spaces. When diverse assemblages of movements come together, political and ideological differences, in addition to incompatible visions of what constitute appropriate tactics, can lead to the dissolution, or reformulation of these spaces. As Francisco indicated, many groups wouldn’t support the direct occupation of agribusiness, and subsequently left the Jornada. The 2006 occupation of SYNGENTA was the last major occupation. Each year there are still marches and demonstrations as part of the Jornada, but the brazen occupations are no longer possible—in part because of broader changes in the political climate. As Francisco related,

Agribusiness is a system of power that is so expansive. It's not possible to confront it in a manner that's not professional. We are in a moment, in which the context in Paraná doesn't permit direct and open conflict with agribuisiness. We would have been destroyed if we had tried.

Francisco highlights the inherent contradictions of political opportunity in social movement mobilization. Political opportunities are “consistent – but not necessarily formal or permanent – dimensions of the political struggle that encourage people to engage in contentious politics (Tarrow, 1998: 32). Scholars of the MST emphasize the role that political opportunities, such as the fall of the Brazilian military dictatorship, played in the MST’s origination and evolution (Ondetti, 2008). Francisco’s comments underscore the problematic relationship between political opportunity and tactical evolution: when political opportunities change, and a government sympathetic to agrarian movements shifts to a hostile one allied with agribusiness, then it can be impossible to engage in certain forms of direct struggle. Francisco hammered home this point, concluding that “it's necessary to be able to read the context of the state and movement politics to engage at this level.” The Jornada tactically transitioned away from explicit occupations, and towards encounters that were more palatable—both within the current political conjecture—and to diverse organizations. For political ecologists of education, it is clear that political opportunities structure what aren’t the potentially viable spatial forms education can take.

Jornada as encounter

While the Jornada no longer engages in the explicit occupation of major agribusiness, it continues to employ the everyday occupation of space. Both the 10th and 11th Jornadas (2011 and 2012) were held at University of Londrina in Paraná. The following extended ethnographic example, drawn from Meek’s participation in the 11th Jornada, highlights the everyday ways in which MST activists physically and symbolically occupy the University, and create new dialogic spaces for agroecological knowledge production.

A single-file line of 50 people marches up the university’s sidewalk. At the front of the procession, two activists hold a banner that reads “Land Free of Pesticides and Transgenics”. Each of the activists that follow is carrying different signs. To the passerby, it might seem as if these were social movement members engaged in protest. Given their MST hats, t-shirts, and flags, a logical conclusion might be that they are on the way to occupy a space. These MST members are, however, not carrying the traditional signs of protest. Rather, each member holds a sign announcing the name of the workshop she will be leading. The signs indicate a breadth of theoretical and practical engagements with agroecology: “The Agroecology of Karl Marx,” “Milk Production,” “Urban and Peri-Urban Agriculture,” “Making Compost,” “Capital’s Offensive Against Nature: Bringing Harvey and Marx into Dialogue,” “Agroecological Techniques for Producing Beans, Corn, and Squash”. Deployed as if they were props in a march, these signs are the symbols of a protest against agroindustrial practices, and an education system that generally doesn’t valorize these practices.

These MST members are not occupying a fazenda, but rather the university directly. The Jornada’s organizers explicitly use this language of ‘occupation’ in describing where the workshops will take occur, and the process through which the Jornada’s participants will transform the university’s space. Once the 4000 participants have assembled in the University’s sports arena, each of the 50 workshop leaders slowly walks down the center of the arena. As the leader passes each row of the Jornada’s participants, individuals join the procession towards that workshop. One of the Jornada’s organizers announces each workshop over a loud speaker “Workshop #13, entitled “Public Policies for Family Farming”, those interested in this workshop, please file in behind the comrade carrying the sign, and ….go occupy the agronomy building! (emphasis in original).” Each of the workshop’s participants next files out of the sports arena and boards one of a score of school busses labeled with the workshop’s name and the University building that it will take place in. The participants in the workshop on “Improving Milk-Cattle Pasture through Supplementary Grain Production” take a bus ride across the University’s sprawling campus, exit the bus, and then walk through a fence that has been left open. Unlike the Jornada’s direct occupation of Monsanto and SYNGENTA, this is an everyday occupation. Yet, it is a form of occupation in dialogue with more explicit occupations, because it also involves the transformation of immaterial territory. This occupation of the university and those of Monsanto and Syngenta are part of a larger ‘journey’ of creating dialogic spaces where education is tactically deployed to transform knowledge, practice, land, and society.

Susannah, an agricultural extension agent from EMATER is leading the workshop, and starts out by telling the packed classroom that “We're here primarily to exchange experiences”. She begins with a group discussion about the proper frequency for providing mineral supplements to cattle. Following this, she encourages participants to pose questions about problems they are having with dairy production. A woman sitting in the middle of the room raises her hand, “We lost five cows at the same time, what do you think it could be”? The technician explores various possibilities, including vaccination, water, and fodder. The original MST participant weighs in on what she thinks might be the cause. Other MST participants also provide their perspectives. Following this dialogue, the workshop turns to its intended focus on increasing grass production.

Susannah begins with a rhetorical question: “What frequently happens if we leave the cattle for too long in one area? They eat up all of the pasture, and degrade the soil, right?” Susannah shows a series of images of degraded pastures.

To remedy this we could use store bought pre-dried food, but that’s prohibitively expensive for small farmers. What we're going to do today is learn how to build a tool that will enable us to bale food, preserving it for the future.

Behind her stands an example of the wooden frame and three bags of pasture grass. After discussing how to build the frame, she has a volunteer fill it with grass, and then another climb into the frame and begin stomping on the grass. When the grass is compacted, she takes the second bag of grass. “This grass was compacted last year, but is still completely fresh”. The workshop’s participants come forth and each grabs a handful, smelling the preserved grass. “As you can see”, Susannah concludes, “this technique requires no tractor, no heavy machinery. This works for the small farmer without expensive input”. This workshop exemplifies a dialogic space consisting of a diálogo de saberes (DS) or “dialogue among different knowledges and ways of knowing” (Martínez-Torres and Rosset, 2014: 2). Its back-and-forth discussion between peasant farmers and a formally trained extension agent and its tactile experiential learning illustrates how the Jornada works to transform immaterial territory—the specific forms of knowledge that govern the usage of material territory. From a political ecology perspective, the type of occupied space influences the nature of education. Everyday spaces, such as these, where different forms of knowledge and practice are synthesized by equals constitute true dialogic learning.

Jornada as journey

The Jornada is a social process of transition away from industrial agriculture and towards small-scale agroecological farming. Any journey comprises disparate moments connected through movement. The Joranda de Agroecología is defined by diverse moments of occupation that are interconnected as part of a discernible journey. Along this journey, we see important shifts concerning the importance of everyday occupations and different framings of agroecology.

Changes in the Jornada’s spatial register highlight important tactical and broader strategic shifts within the MST. Although the early Jornadas involved direct contestations and confrontations over space, political opportunities have shifted, forcing a change in tactics. The Jornada’s spatial transition tracks a larger one within the MST as a whole. Occupations within the MST have declined extensively since the mid-2000s. For example, at the apex in 2004, there were 662 land occupations involving nearly 111,500 families. In 2013, by comparison, there were only 257 occupations, which only involved 23,300 families (Fernandes and Welch 2008; IBGE). Since the mid-2000s, the MST’s brazen occupation of space has been increasingly replaced by the quotidian—as exemplified by the occupation of the university. Roseli Caldart, pedagogue and militant within the MST’s education sector, argues that occupying the school (occupar a escola) challenges the historical exclusion of the landless from access to land and knowledge. Caldart stresses the importance of this act: “the simple fact of the MST helping the landless enter school can be considered an action as radical as that of breaking down the fence of the latifundio” (2004: 223, my translation). Non-formal learning opportunities, such as the Jornada, and more formalized courses through PRONERA, enable the landless to access spaces of knowledge production, such as the university, that have been historically inaccessible. For the MST, part of occupying education is creating spaces where there can be a cross-fertilization of peasant and academic forms of knowledge. The Jornada’s occupation of the University of Londrina in 2011 and 2012 were moments in this broader journey of transforming education by hybridizing environmental knowledge.

The MST’s engagement with agroecology has also evolved alongside the Jornada’s trajectory. The MST has historically espoused a political understanding of agroecology (de Molina, 2013) where the sustainability of peasant agroecosystems is used to critique the exploitative nature of the industrial agricultural system. However, the movement’s internal discourse has increasingly shifted to emphasize agroecology’s scientific characteristics, in part because it provides an empirical way of demonstrating the value of peasant production systems (Delgado, 2008; Delgado and Rommetveit, 2012). Undoubtedly, many within the movement’s intellectual vanguard continue to see agroecology as a potent symbolic tactic for directly confronting agribusiness—as the Monsanto and Syngenta actions indicate, tearing up transgenic plots and replacing them with criolle (heirloom) varieties makes an unequivocal statement. However, agroecology has increasing acceptance within the scientific, technical, and donor communities. For the Jornada to serve as a more welcoming convergence space, the MST has begun to accept a more holistic view of agroecology. In addition to making statements about agroecology’s political potential, the MST highlights its scientific and technical aspects through the Jornada. This is not only a more viable tactic in the current political conjecture, but spatially is also more likely to encourage meaningful dialogue. A broader spatial shift has taken place within the MST; it is one which recognizes that the moment and the everyday are two parts of a broader communicative process, and require different voices at different moments.

Conclusion

Social movements have long produced spaces for learning (Endresen and Von Kotze, 2005; Foley, 1999). As part of the process of training movement members, these spaces play a key role in the “creation, reformulation and diffusion” of alternative knowledge systems (Casa-Cortés et al., 2008). The geography of conferences is an important site for the interrelated processes of knowledge production and social protest (Craggs and Mahony, 2014). We have shown that the Jornada’s occupation of space—in its diverse interrelated forms—is key to the production of alternative forms of environmental knowledge and practice within the MST.

The results of this study demonstrate that creation of dialogic spaces results in learning within movements. The MST learned, following the occupation of Syngenta, that many organizations left the Jornada because they would not support the direct confrontation with agribusiness. Applying these lessons, the agroecological transition is now being advanced through more institutionally palatable forms of occupation.

Seeing this spatial dynamism as a form of learning highlights an important lesson for social movement activists. Decreases in new occupations—frequently thought of as the MST’s characteristic tactic—do not spell the end of the movement. The MST describes the current political conjecture moment as a phase of acumulação de forças (accumulation of forces). To accumulate forces means to strengthen the movement internally. Everyday events, like the Jornada, which bring disparate movement members together as part of a shared experience, are powerful means of strengthening the movement. They connect individuals together as part of community of praxis—a network of learners devoted to employing knowledge towards transformative social and environmental change. The Jornada’s participants come away with a deeper understanding of the structural contradictions that the MST struggles against, as well as practical agroecological methods for transforming these systems. Generating this critical consciousness is an important form of building a broader base. Movement leaders should recognize it as an essential form of trabalho de base (essentially grassroots organizing) that is necessary for advancing the broader struggle.

Finally, this article advances the broader political ecology of education framework in two ways. First, moving beyond the individual, we gain a perspective on how movements themselves learn through a geographic process, shifting between various forms of spatial occupation. In addition, the lens of dialogic spaces sheds light upon how geographic learning processes can potentially transform broader society—that is, when the spatial form of occupation actually produces dialogue. Second, these results help to break down the distinctions between different forms of learning. The Jornada is part of the broader journey of advancing educação do campo. The Jornada principally involves non-formal, and conversational learning. The broader Educação do Campo movement, however, has also had impressive success in advancing formal education, as typified by PRONERA. Seeing these spatial forms of learning as continuous—as part of a broader journey—advances Routledge and Fernandes’ ideas of movements as multiplicities, by articulating the interconnectedness of the moments of knowledge production. The political ecology of education framework illuminates the role of social movements in enabling the production of spaces of alternative environmental knowledge and practice. Directing this lens towards other social movements can shed light on how movements transform their members, policy, and larger society through their dynamic educational tactics.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was generously funded by NSF grant BCS #1060888, and fellowships through the the Fulbright Program, and the Social Science Research Council, which Meek was awarded.

Notes

David Meek is an environmental anthropologist, critical geographer, food systems education scholar with an area specialization in Brazil. Meek theoretically grounds his research in a synthesis of political ecology, critical pedagogy, and agrarian studies. His interests include: sustainable agriculture, social movements, and environmental education. In a series of recent publications, Meek has begun advancing a theoretical framework of the political ecology of education. This perspective illuminates how the reciprocal relations between political economic forces and pedagogical opportunities—from tacit to formal learning—affect the production, dissemination, and contestation of environmental knowledge at various interconnected scales.

Ligia TL Simonian has a doctorate in anthropology from the City University. She is currently an associate professor at the Federal University of Para in Brazil, and is also a faculty member in the Nucleus of Advanced Amazonian Studies (Núcleo de Altos Estudos Amazônicos or NAEA). She has experience in the field of Anthropology, with emphasis on Anthropological Theory, Development Anthropology, interdisciplinary methodology, as well as in public policy and sustainable development. She focuses on public policies in both the Brazilian Amazon, and Amapá region of the Guianas, exploring the linkages between biosociodiversity, traditional populations, and international border areas.

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