Agroecological education on contested ground: Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement and the politics of knowledge Open Access

On the morning of August 13, 2020, the Brazilian military police invaded an agroecological school, known as Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano, announcing that they would shortly commence demolishing the building, and evicting the families living near it.¹ The military police threatened the children, teachers, and staff, demanding that the school be emptied of all supplies and individuals within the hour. Afraid of losing their books, desks, and all the office materials that were there, the broader community began a joint effort to remove all the belongings before the building was demolished. After 36 hours of active resistance on behalf of the community’s families, the Brazilian state succeeded in its goal of bulldozing the school, and evicting 14 families that were living nearby. The military police’s offensive was both one part of a broader campaign by Romeu Zema Neto, the right-wing Governor of the state of Minas Gerais, to accelerate the process of closing rural schools statewide, and also indicative of the larger criminalization of rural social movements driven by Brazil’s recent conservative presidents Jair Bolsonaro and Michel Temer (Scalabrin, 2008; de Campos and de Campos, 2023).

The Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano, which was located in a social movement encampment known as Quilombo Campo Grande, in southern Minas Gerais, Brazil, was part of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra or MST), the largest agrarian social movement in Latin America. The images of bulldozers destroying the school went viral on social media, making visible the Brazilian state’s criminalization of social movements, and its efforts to silence grassroots spaces of agroecological knowledge production (Coca et al., 2021; Alves, 2022). Importantly, these images also helped mobilize a global solidarity campaign in support of the community’s resilience, leading to the reconstruction of the school. After a grassroots process of debate, the community decided that the new school would not only be a space for popular education; it dreamed that the new school would serve as the cornerstone for the region’s emerging agroecological transformation.

The state’s demolition of the MST’s Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano and the global solidarity movement that helped the community rebuild it as space for agroecological education underscore that contestations over the politics of knowledge are at the core of struggles to define, massify, and practice agroecology (Utter et al., 2021). Following Goldman and colleagues (2011), we understand the politics of knowledge as surrounding the production, circulation, and application of knowledge. The politics of knowledge are central to political ecology. For example, as Roderick Neumann argues in the opening to the now-classic work Making Political Ecology, “The environment and how we acquire, disseminate, and legitimate knowledge about it are highly politicized, reflective of relations of power and contested” (2005, p. 1). Political ecologists of education recognize that grassroots agroecological education projects exemplify the ways in which power, resistance, and alternative epistemologies come into direct conflict with the state’s support of agribusiness and its neoliberal model of rural development (Meek and Simonian, 2017; Meek et al., 2017; Meek, 2020). From this theoretical vantage, the violent struggle over the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano and its subsequent reconstruction signify that struggles over land are often not simply about the physicality of land, but rather what the land means, what it stands for, the emotions it evokes and the dreams it contains. These contestations are about territory.

Questions of territory have long been at the core of human geography (Elden, 2010). Understandings of territory have evolved from a fixed sovereign “container” (Agnew, 1994), to a multi-scalar set of processes (Brenner, 1999), to more contemporary analyses of territory’s networked and relational nature (Painter, 2010). Neither synonymous with land nor terrain, territory is construed through political legal mechanisms and made legible through the quantification of geographic space. While analyses of territory have historically focused on the modern, Eurocentric state (Sahlins, 1989), scholars have increasingly explored territorial debates in the Global South (Ince, 2012; Del Biaggio, 2015; Routledge, 2015). In particular, over the last decade, geographers have paid increasing attention to territory in Latin American contexts (Reyes and Kaufman, 2011; Bryan, 2012; Sandoval et al., 2016; Schwarz and Streule, 2016; Clare et al., 2017). Peasant territories are characterized by complexity, dynamism, and contradictions (Escobar, 2010). As van den Berg et al. (2022) argue, peasant territories embody both the socio-material basis for emancipatory action as well as the emergent futures that peasants seek to forge and sustain.

Our analysis of the struggle over the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano begins from 2 theoretical starting points. First is Halvorsen’s (2019) analysis of the concept of territory in Latin America, where it is conceived of as the “appropriation of space in pursuit of political projects—in which multiple (from bottom-up grassroots to top-down state) political strategies exist as overlapping and entangled” (p. 791). The community’s reconstruction of the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano as a political space of agroecological knowledge production exemplifies the conclusions of an emerging literature, which positions agroecological education as a key part of grassroots’ movement territorial political projects (Rosset, 2013; McCune et al., 2017). For example, both the peasant-to-peasant (also known as Campesino a Campesino) horizontal pedagogy and political agroecological training schools of La Via Campesina draw upon critical conceptions of territory to help instill a sense of sociohistorical subjectivity in their students, and an understanding of the movements themselves as territorially embedded, collective historical actors (McCune and Sánchez, 2018; Rosset et al., 2019; Val et al., 2019). Through our analysis, we seek to directly contribute to a debate started by agrarian geographers Fernandes (2005; 2009), and Halvorsen (2019) about socio-territorial movements, for whom the transformation of territory is a central movement aim, which is key to the movement’s identity, members’ political subjectivities, and a site for political education.

Second are discussions of the intersection of affect and territory in an emerging literature on social movements. Affect signifies bodily sensations and desires, including wishes, passions, and grievance, that connect humans with the more-than-human world in dynamic relationships (van den Berg et al., 2022, p. 51). Affective labor involves nurturing and structuring visceral sensations or somatic experiences so as to help mobilize and organize people and communities (van den Berg et al., 2022). Throughout Latin America, the “body as territory” metaphor is widely mobilized by social movements (Masson et al., 2017). Sweet and Ortiz (2016), for example, explain that native women in Latin America emphasize a relational understanding of territory, which sees the body as an extension of the land, as opposed to a separate geographic space.

To understand what is at stake in the struggle over the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano, one must mobilize a multifaced understanding of territory and differentiate material from immaterial territory. Immaterial territory is the landscape of ideas and helps structure the material form territory takes. For Fernandes (2009), material and ideological territories are interconnected. For example, peasant agroecological knowledge about planting informs the spacing of crops and what form intercropping takes; by contrast, extension agents drawing upon biotechnological knowledge and related technological forms of intervention will structure management schemes based around monoculture and petrochemical inputs. Critical Indian scholar and activist Vandana Shiva (1993) highlights the implications of how immaterial territory structures land management in her phrasing of “monocultures of the mind.” Shiva’s phrasing is powerfully symbolic and draws attention to both how Western modernity is colonized by a homogenous epistemology in which only particular Western conceptions of knowledge exist but also importantly that landscapes defined by monoculture are a product of this singular mentality. The destruction of the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano school highlights that agroecological education is a direct threat to those in power. It is dangerous in part because it constitutes epistemic disobedience; by valorizing peasant systems of agrarian knowledge and practice, movement educators are training students to delink from the “magic of the Western idea of modernity, ideals of humanity and promises of economic growth and financial prosperity” (Mignolo, 2011).

In this article, we seek to synthesize the literature on emotional geographies with the above discussions of im/material territories. Political ecologists are increasingly focusing on the role of emotion and affect in the subversion of hegemonic power and defense of the commons (Dallman et al., 2013; Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2013; Horowitz, 2013; Gonzalez-Hidalgo, 2021, p. 1291). This embodied work is essential, for as Pulido notes (2017, p. 530), scholars gain access to understanding the “interior” dimensions of social movements by analyzing the “emotions, psychological development, souls and passions” of its members. Our analysis, which highlights the role of societal indignation in creating support for the new school, buttresses the arguments made by Woods (2015) on the critical role of moral outrage in other social movements. Theoretically, we seek to integrate insights from agrarian geography surrounding territory (Fernandes, 2023) with conversations in the political ecology of education, surrounding how political economy and power mediate access to education—along a spatial and pedagogical continuum of formality, ranging from informal to formal education (Meek, 2015, Meek and Simonian, 2017; Meek et al., 2017; Meek, 2020), and insights from emotional political ecology surrounding how emotions become mobilized strategically by different social groups to mediate resource access and control (Sultana, 2015)

We start by discussing our positionality, and the methods through which we gathered and analyzed these data. We then introduce the MST, contextualizing its territorial expansion in the state of Minas Gerais. Next, we explore the rise and fall of agro-industrial capitalism in the municipality of Campo Grande, exploring the MST’s struggles over land and knowledge. We then present our analysis of the research’s thematic results, highlighting how solidarity, moral outrage, and an agroecological vision intersect to condition the community’s efforts to transform its interwoven material and immaterial territories. These qualitative data were gathered remotely through Zoom interviews with 4 educators from the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano in March 2023. These data are buttressed by additional ethnographic results drawn from Coca’s long-term research in the community.

In this article, we present results drawn from a broader 6-year ethnographic project led by Coca in Quilombo Campo Grande. This larger project focused on the history of popular education actions at the former Eduardo Galeano School, strategic partnerships between activist educators and university allies in southern Minas Gerais, and initiatives to advance a new regional agroecology center in this community (Coca et al., 2018; Coca et al., 2021; Coca and Barbosa, 2024). The results we subsequently discuss arose from a subproject entitled “Contestations and agroecological transition in the South and Southwest of Minas Gerais,” which was financed by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and registered with the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Alfenas (Unifal-MG) through the Plataforma Brasil database. To identify the interviewees, we prioritized educators who had been key actors throughout the entire process of implementing popular education in Quilombo Campo Grande. Our sample size for this subproject was small, consisting of 4 educators, because these were the only individuals who had been part of the school since its origins, and who remain active in the community. One interviewee was a man who worked as a history teacher at the school when it was linked to the state government of Minas Gerais and 3 women who worked as popular educators as part of the MST’s political education initiatives in Campo do Meio. All of the educators we interviewed are also MST activists, which underscores the fact that in addition to their pedagogical work, they also participate in efforts to implement agrarian reform in the occupied area. Data from these interviews were analyzed within the MaxQDA software package using a grounded theory framework (Corbin and Strauss, 2015). Through an interactive process, central themes in the interviews were coded, comparatively analyzed, and grouped into thematic narratives, which we present below. In addition to our interviews with these educators, our research draws upon the broader insights gleaned through Coca’s long-term participatory research in this community to shed light onto how political economic shifts in the broader region intersect with both the territorial confrontations resulting in the destruction of the school, as well as the MST’s efforts to rebuild it as a center for popular agroecological education.

The MST is one of the largest agrarian social movements in Latin America (Tarlau, 2014). The MST can be described as a socio-spatial movement, as it creates and mediates space. However, the MST is also a socio-territorial movement, because it appropriates spaces and transforms them into territories (Fernandes, 2023). Land occupation is a central example of how the MST transforms spaces into territories. MST members tactically occupy what they argue is unused agricultural land as a means to pressure the Brazilian government to take that land, and create a community for its members. When occupying land, landless families first create a camp (acampamento), which is a space of struggle and resistance that can result in a settlement (assentamento), that is, a territory where families will build a community. Through the MST members’ labor, the conquered land will change its use, which means changing its territoriality. This process of creating spaces and transforming territories has been going on for 40 years, through what can be termed the “territorialization” of the struggle for land. From its beginnings in the early 1980s in southern Brazil, the movement has spread throughout the country and is active throughout 23 out of 27 states.

A common saying within the MST is that the movement must break down both the fences around land and knowledge. Just as land has historically been concentrated, so too has access to knowledge been restricted, and concentrated in the hands of social elites (Plank, 1995). For the endogenous development of the MST’s conquered territories, it sees it as necessary to advance emancipatory forms of agroecological education and production. Since the 1990s, the MST has actively worked to develop its own approach to education, grounded in the critical pedagogies of Brazilian Paulo Freire, and early 20th century Russian pedagogues Moisey Pristak, and Anton Makarenko (Tarlau, 2012). This pedagogical model is known as educação do campo (education from and of the countryside). Educação do campo can be seen as diametrically opposed to the state’s rural education program, which has historically subordinated peasant education (Meek, 2020). Agroecology plays a central role in the MST (Barcello, 2010; Martins, 2012), and its educação do campo model, helping families develop diversified agricultural systems and livelihoods and transition away from pesticide-intensive and export-oriented forms of production (Borsatto and Simões do Carmo, 2013; da Silva et al., 2018). The MST has been waging a struggle over the territory that makes up Quilombo Campo Grande for several decades, seeking to transform the interlocking fences around knowledge and land.

The agrarian reform area of Quilombo Campo Grande is the product of a larger historical and spatial process of the expansion of the MST throughout Minas Gerais.² This process of territorialization can be broadly divided into 4 periods. In the first period (1984–2005), the MST was just beginning its mobilizations and land occupations in the state. In 1984, the formation of the MST in Minas Gerais took place in the Mucuri and Jequitinhonha valleys. The MST carried out its first land occupation on February 12, 1988, with 400 families seizing the Aruega farm in the Municipality of Novo Cruzeiro. This occupation was historically significant as the beginning of the MST’s actions in the state of Minas Gerais and serves as a reference point for the movement’s territorialization (Fernandes, 2000).

During the second period (2005–2008), the movement was able to massify itself as a political actor in the state. In 2005, a social forum was held here in the region, with the city’s workers as well as those from the countryside. In 2007 and 2008, the movement held popular assemblies, both in the south of Minas and in the nearby municipality of Campo das Vertentes. However, this time period was also marked by state repression, and in 2009 there was a massive eviction of 98 families from the community of Tiradentes, which belongs to the Quilombo Campo Grande.

The third period (2009–2012) is what the community’s leaders refer to as a period of “rearticulation,” referring to the internal process of regrouping after the 2009 eviction, and it’s re-envisioning its struggle against agribusiness in the south of Minas Gerais. During this time, many families moved to encampment, beginning a process of expanding the movement’s occupation, and taking over new land belonging to a massive former agribusiness establishment, known as the Ariadnópolis plant. This period is also marked by the extensive grassroots mobilization of new families living in the metropolitan region of Campinas. By mobilizing new families, the MST was able to build a large contingent of families who would strengthen the movement, and its presence in the new occupations located within the broader Quilombo Campo Grande territory.

The fourth period (2012–onward) is marked by the expansion of the MST’s ties to federal institutes and universities. After 2012, the MST began to expand its partnerships with federal institutes and universities, offering a set of courses for movement members. These new initiatives allowed the MST to strengthen its struggle in the countryside, as the formally trained peasants were able to contribute to the agroecological transition in their territories. These partnerships were also important because by fostering partnerships with the federal institutes and universities, the MST intensified the fight over shaping education.

Since the 1990s, the struggle over the network of encampments that make up Quilombo Campo Grande encampments has been one of the most emblematic conflicts over land ownership in southern Brazil. This conflict brought into focus the racialized struggle for land, in which people of color, including the peasantry, quilombolas (descendants of runaway slaves), and indigenous peoples, are both repressed by and resist against capitalist agriculture (Fernandes, 2005).

The 3,190 hectares (ha) that are presently occupied by the 12 Quilombo Campo Grande encampments originally belonged to the Ariadnópolis sugar and ethanol plant, located in the municipality of Campo do Meio, which for much of the 20th century was one of the major zones of sugar and alcohol in the southern Minas Gerais. The history of agribuisness is intertwined with the foundation of the municipality of Campo do Meio. In 1903, the Portuguese immigrant Manoel Alves de Azevedo (1858–1950) donated plots of land to a village, leading to the creation of the municipality of Campo do Meio, and in 1906 to the founding of the Ariadnópolis sugarcane plant. Exchanges of favors between the state and private capital were frequent in the first decades of operation of the Ariadnópolis plant, with Azevedo family members serving as both the head of this agricultural enterprise and the mayor of the municipality (Rodrigues, 2021; Bertachi, 2023). The relationship between the Ariadnópolis plant and the municipality of Campo do Meio exemplifies how clientelism characterizes the development of capitalist agriculture in Brazil.

The economic peak of Ariadnópolis plant occurred in the 1970s, when it largely benefited from credits from the National Alcohol Program (PróAlcool), an initiative of the Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964–1985) to reduce dependence on fossil fuels through increased consumption of ethanol fuel. Through the assistance of this state program, Ariadnópolis established itself as the main employer in Campo do Meio, having around 2,000 employees, in addition to a large infrastructure with a chemical analysis laboratory and a large fleet of vehicles (Bertachi, 2023). The main destinations for production at the Ariadnópolis plant were the fuel companies Shell and Petrobrás.

However, at the beginning of the 1990s, as part of Brazil’s insertion into neoliberalism, the Government of Fernando Collor de Mello (1990–1992) extinguished PróAlcool. The Ariadnópolis plant entered a major internal crisis and control of the company was transferred to the Vanguard Agro Industrial group. Despite the change in ownership, the factory was unable to regain its financial solvency and declared bankruptcy in 1996.

During the decline of the Ariadnópolis plant, several complaints about working conditions and disrespect for labor legislation came to light. Among these, the nonpayment of the Service Time Guarantee Fund (FGTS) and dismissals without payment of compensation stand out (Coca et al., 2018). In 1994, the Rural Workers Union (STR) and the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) sought to address this situation, and organized a strike that lasted more than 100 days. Union activists identified agrarian reform as a possible way to address the crisis; regional MST leaders took up this proposal and sent activists to the south of Minas Gerais to advance the struggle for agrarian reform (Bertachi, 2023).

In 1996, as a result of this grassroots groundwork, the MST occupied the Jatobá farm, which was a former coffee establishment adjacent to the lands of Ariadnópolis plant (Moreira, 2017). This occupation resulted in the creation of the “1º do Sul” Settlement, in 1997, with 42 people spread over around 888 ha (DATALUTA, 2022). With the success of this first occupation, in 1998, the MST sought to expand its efforts and began occupying the lands of the Ariadnópolis plant. The first occupation of the former Ariadnópolis facility took place in an area called Coloninha; however, the MST activists were evicted and the land repossessed by the state just a few days later. These families were undeterred and returned to occupy other areas of the former large estate, fomenting a conflict that has been going on for over 25 years.

Since 1998, the MST has been responsible for establishing 11 of the 12 camps that currently form Quilombo Campo Grande, where almost 2,000 people live. In 2014, 12 families were legally settled on 300 ha of the Ariadnópolis plant in what is now known as Nova Conquista II settlement, however, this was far from resolving the conflict. Between 2015 and 2019, a period in which Fernando Pimentel, from the Workers’ Party (PT), was Governor of Minas Gerais, there was an attempt to expropriate the entire area for the purposes of agrarian reform, however, with the electoral victory of Romeu Zema, from the political party Partido Novo (2020–current), this legal process was stopped.

There are significant agroecological initiatives in the encampments that make up Quilombo Campo Grande, including a nursery, where plant seedlings originating from the Atlantic Forest biome are produced, and the Coletivo de Mulheres Raízes da Terra (Roots of the Earth Women’s Collective) which offers an alternative income generation options for female farmers. The nursery was started in 2016 in the aftermath of a significant environmental disaster in Mariana, Minas Gerais created by Vale, one of Brazil’s largest mining companies. The government project, entitled Plantando o Futuro, allocated part of the compensation money after the environmental disaster to finance a series of nurseries, a measure to mitigate the environmental impact caused by Vale. The Coletivo de Mulheres Raízes da Terra is made up of approximately 50 peasant women who work on the cultivation of medicinal herbs and production of herbal medicines, representing the central female role in the construction of agroecology. This collective has been one of the main links between Quilombo Campo Grande and formal educational institutions in the south of Minas Gerais and has been primarily responsible for scaling up agroecological production of farmers living in the Campo do Meio municipality. For example, between 2020 and 2021, the collective offered a course on herbal medicine production through a partnership with the Center for Studies on Work, Agroecology and Food Sovereignty (NETASA), at the Federal University of Alfenas (Unifal-MG).

The agroecological transition of Quilombo Campo Grande has been responsible for a significant change in the landscape of the territory that previously, when controlled by the Ariadnópolis plant, was characterized by monoculture. According to the preliminary field survey by Coca in 2023, this territory is now distinguished by a significant degree of agroecological diversity, consisting of 109 varieties of native trees, 83 types of fruit trees, and 59 different crop varieties. Quilombo Campo Grande’s main commercialized agricultural product is Arabica coffee, which occupies 640 ha. Families from Quilombo Campo Grande participate in the Cooperative of Peasant Farmers of southern Minas Gerais (Cooperativa dos Camponeses e Camponesas do Sul de Minas Gerais) and are responsible for producing coffee sold under the Guaí label, which is found in different parts of Brazil.

As this history highlights, the struggle over the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano is part of a much longer conflict over territory. The Ariadnópolis plant epitomized colonial inequities of land concentration and its linkages to political power. More recently, the bankruptcy of the plant in the context of neoliberal policy shifts and the violations that workers experienced there further exemplify the ways in which capital creates territories of crisis, which in themselves are openings that grassroots movements can seize to advance social justice. As we will now explore, the struggle over the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano represents how affective mobilizations over material and immaterial territory are intertwined.

In 2018, the state political landscape underwent a massive shift, fomenting a radical transformation in the twin material and immaterial landscape of the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano. When the Pimentel government lost the state gubernatorial elections, Romeu Zema Neto, a Brazilian businessman, administrator, and politician affiliated with the Novo party took power. One of Zema’s first acts was to accelerate the process of closing rural schools statewide. As Jeová, an MST educator from Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano, explains, “in 2018, the school was closed. Zema entered the government, and he cut it, he closed the school—suspended all activity.” In Jeová’s analysis, Zema’s rationale was that the “school didn’t have students.” However, Jeová understands Zema’s actions as part of a focused political strike against the MST, which his government has criminalized and persecuted until the present day. Zema’s government called for the closure of the encampment’s school, claiming that they didn’t have sufficient students in the school, and there was no need to keep a group of teachers there, because there was a school in the city where the students could move. For Jeová, this was a political mandate, as Zema was elected on his promise of combatting rural social movements, such as the MST.

Alongside the suspension of the school’s pedagogical activities, the state sought to control its physical territory as well. By this point the school had already been officially closed—closed in the sense of it offering education being administered by the state, but it continued to function as a critical site of knowledge production. The Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano remained a center of political training (formação), and MST activists continued to use it to hold meetings, trainings, and discussions. As Jeová underscored, the space of the school was critically important, as it enabled activists to “maintain our force alive.” While frequently the closure of a school will focus on the cessation of school activities, in this encampment, the conflict over the school was connected to the broader struggle over land between the MST and the state.

In 2020, the government began pursuing various legal processes of eviction simultaneously. One of these was the seizure of the school. The state began signaling it would repossess the school area, which included the buildings of the original plant, including old laboratories, a workshop, and a garage. As Jeová describes it, “the movement was protesting the evictions, arguing that it was unjust to be evicting people during the pandemic, and that areas that were being demanded by the courts were not technically within the legal process that had been determined.” Activists actively mobilized from February until August 2020 in preparation for the eviction, which the state continued to signal was increasingly imminent.

On August 11, 2020, the eviction began with the area around the school. As Jeová describes it, “the police arrived in the early morning with all of the equipment and firepower they had available, including riot police, helicopters, and fire engines. More than 50 vehicles. It was truly impressive, truly impressive the arsenal that the police had assembled for the eviction. And the process of eviction was live cast on the Military Police’s internet page.” Jeová describes what that moment of devastation was like:

Jeová’s emotive recollection is characterized by indignation, a sense of moral outrage that the community’s values, principles, and history had been violated. His indignation is explicitly both embodied and territorial: what the military police destroyed was what the MST activists and their allies had physically created. This was both a personal history that was expunged (“native trees that I had planted”), and a collective project of national and international solidarity. What the military police destroyed was the embodied territoriality of a political project. Through years of solidarity work, MST activists and their allies, embedded within domestic institutional spaces and international fora, had begun physically developing the school as a territory of agroecological knowledge production. What the state was destroying was the manifestation of this immaterial and affective territory—the embodied transformation of the school’s material territory represented by thousands of native trees and fruiting plants. The state was trying to extinguish a grassroots vision for agroecological education, one that activists had forged through affective labor. However, the bulldozing of the school proved a pivotal moment in the mobilization of both the community in the encampment, but also its solidarity networks.

This collective process would involve building a community much broader than the geographic community of the encampment. As Jeová remembers, “bulldozing the school began an indignation, a revolt, but also solidarity, around the country, and around the world, with people who said that to bulldoze a school is a crime.” The images of the school being destroyed, of children picking through the rubble of the school for their books, of a tractor driving over the rubble, of comparative images that circulated on social media of the school being active and it destroyed, all of this had massive repercussions. Jeová believes the government hadn’t realized the impact bulldozing the school would have.

The destruction of the school was an action that had deep symbolism and invoked a visceral affective mobilization. Deploying bulldozers to raze the school struck a nerve that was felt within not only domestic Brazilian society but globally as well. It yielded a sense of indignation, which social movement scholars would term a collective grievance (Tarrow, 2001), which led to the articulation of a normative collective campaign. The mobilization that emerged spawned a solidarity movement called “No meu bule não” (Not in my teapot). This movement was created to generate broader social indignation about the plight of the families being evicted and to highlight the role of large coffee-producing companies in the eviction process. As the MST argued, the region’s coffee baron João Faria da Silva, whose plantations consist of more than 18 million coffee plants, and is one of the country’s largest exporters, was a major force in advancing the evictions, with the intention of gaining access to the land to expand his coffee production. Part of the “No meu bule não” movement’s moral argument was that Faria da Silva was using modern slave labor on his plantations, and that a social boycott of coffee brands such as Nespresso, Nescafé, Pilão, Café Pelé, Café do Ponto, L’OR, Damasco, and Senseo was necessary to pressure Nestlé and Jacob’s Douwe Egberts, 2 of Faria da Silva’s largest buyers.

The vaulted social response following the bulldozing of the school signals the close interconnections between affective labor, power, and social conflict that are the core of emotional political ecology. Passions, feelings, and grievances shape particular constructions of territory, structuring normative judgments about what is the “proper” use for the landscape, how surplus value will be extracted, and what types of individuals are legitimate and condoned to utilize or manage a landscape. The MST’s occupation of the land and creation of the school provoked a moral outrage on the part of powerful agribusiness elites and the state, who often brand the movement’s activists as “thieves,” that are “stealing” land. However, the converse, the bulldozing of the school also provoked a substantial outrage, leading to the “No meu bule não” movement. As van den Berg et al. (2022) argue, for grievances, wishes and other affects to become transformative, they must problematize oppressive power relations (p. 51). This passionate campaign, which sought to redress a shared grievance by highlighting Faria da Silva’s use of modern slave labor, proved critical in the MST’s ongoing process of transforming territory.

The closure of the school created great indignation, but also solidarity. In addition to international solidarity, local and regional allies demonstrated a commitment to help rebuild the school. “We have various publishers that want to donate books, professors that also want to donate books, and other materials, like bricks, we have folks volunteering to help us with collective work parties. And so in this way, we’re rebuilding everyday a little bit, and in this way we’re resisting.” Territory is made and remade through affective labor, exploitation, and struggle. But a little explored analysis is that the reciprocal is also true: Social relations of affective labor are created and remade by territory itself. For political ecologists of education, a key question is how the dialectical relationship between the social production of space and the spatial production of the social is interwoven (Meek, 2020). The destruction of the school and the solidarity actions that helped rebuild it highlight how the material destruction of the one territory (the school) generated solidarity relationships and affective labor that led to the creation of a new territory, a new school, which would have an explicitly agroecological character. The destruction and reconstruction of the school highlight that affective labor can function as a dialectical mechanism within a political ecology of education; moral indignation can result in the destruction of a school, but it can also lead to its reconstitution.

Following the bulldozing of the school, the community engaged in a debate about where the new school would be sited: Would it be reconstructed in the encampment, or in one of the neighboring, and already legalized, settlements? In a meeting of MST leaders at the regional level, Jeová describes how “we decided we would reconstruct the school within the area of the encampment—within an area of literal conflict—because we felt that we’ve been in control of this area, that for more than 25 years, this area has been squatted by these families, and they’ve demarcated it.” What is explicitly clear in Jeová’s retelling is the tactical nature of the political discussion that the MST leadership had in thinking about the spatiality of the future school. While a safer decision—quite literally—would have been to rebuild the school in an already legalized settlement, the movement’s leadership “decided to create the school within the encampment and specifically in an area …where it could be seen … in an area, where it could be seen as demarcating the territorialization of the MST.” Here, we see how territory becomes embodied within a political ecology of education. The emphasis on the siting of the school was tactical for where it would be seen. The political optics of sense of sight were mobilized strategically by the MST’s educators and leaders. Jeová is unequivocal here: the siting of the school is an act of territoriality, which is a process of exerting control over territory (Sack, 1986; Storey, 2018). Political ecologists of education highlight that educators can employ education as a form of territoriality in several ways, by either promoting the dominant ideologies and associated forms of land use or, alternatively, critiquing the dominant ideas about land use, and advocating counter-hegemonic forms (Meek, 2015). The decision to locate the school within the encampment offers an important novel example of yet another form of territoriality—by tactically mobilizing the siting of the school, MST leaders and educators used its embodied spatiality to make visible the interwoven material and immaterial territory at the core of the movement’s vision. The activists situated the school to create an affective and embodied understanding of the school’s role in contesting this territory.

While the materiality of the school experienced wild oscillations, the community’s connection to the school never ceased. As María José—another educator in the school—describes, “It (the school) was interrupted, it was suspended, but we didn’t let the building die.” Here, María José draws upon the nomenclature that the Brazilian government uses in describing school closures; the school in the encampment was “suspended,” meaning it continued to exist in name, and its 6-digit code remained in the Ministry of Education’s database. Rural schools may have their activities suspended for months or years for various reasons, for example, not having the minimum number of students required by the Ministry of Education, or lack of school maintenance. In these cases, schools have their activities suspended and are temporarily closed. While the school wasn’t a space for official education, it was definitively a space for political training (formação). As María José explains,

In describing the school as a community, María José connects the materiality of the school to its embodied geography—the school serves as a space for gathering, for mobilizing, for forming political subjectivities and a broader movement. The materiality of the school is mobilized to generate affective labor, to cultivate and encourage embodied experiences, wishes, and passions as a way of mobilizing people. This insight adds two crucial elements to theorizing a political ecology of education framework. First, one must consider affective and embodied relations as part of an analysis of the politics of knowledge. Schools are spaces of formação, of training and development, but in visceral registers that we are only starting to gain awareness of. Second, educational spaces, which are processual, can only be transformed, never truly negated—as they continue to exist in memory and community. This second insight emerged from listening to Genilda, another MST educator in the community, who underscored the symbolic importance of María José’s point, describing that:

Here, Genilda leans into the deeper and contested meaning of the school; parodying the state’s perspective, she describes the purported value of education as being confined to social reproduction—education is valuable in producing laborers who exist at the level of pure survival. But from the MST’s perspective, true education is about formação, it is from a Freirean sense a process of generating critical consciousness of one’s agentive capacity, one’s ability to act as a political subject, and to understand and make history.

Through all of these struggles, the community has made major inroads in materializing its affective vision. As María José reflects,

What María José describes is a true space defined by and for the community, for both individual and collective development. The school’s space functions to gather individuals provide lifelong learning opportunities and serve as a space for mobilization.

Schools are undoubtedly affective spaces of material and immaterial resistance within the MST. The original siting of the Eduardo Galeano school in the plant’s building, its subsequent eviction and destruction, and then the tactical deliberations regarding the re-siting of the school, and the international and regional solidarity that led to its reconstruction are all exemplars of both affective labor, power and resistance came together to structure the school’s dynamic history. This is a point that Genilda went on to make forcefully,

As Genilda describes it, the school embodies material and immaterial territory. It is a form of material resistance on the land, but its meaning is deeper, and connected to the movement’s broader ideology. “With time folks will realize that it’s knowledge that liberates. When people are producing knowledge in a space, like we are doing here, what it ends up doing is disrupting, the production of knowledge, ends up bothering the powerful.” Genilda here speaks to the linkage of knowledge and power and how the disrupted contestation of the intertwined material and immaterial forms of territory is a direct confrontation to hegemonic forces. Highlighting why the school was targeted for destruction, Genilda underscores the centrality of affective relations, “the school reproduces knowledge, there’s a sense of liberty for you to be able to live, to dream, to plant, to tend to the land. I think it’s for this reasons that they first picked the school; to destroy the school. Exactly because by doing this, they’re taking the right (to education) away from the children.” Here the linkage between education and visioning is again explicitly clear; yes, the school is associated with knowledge, but more than that its associated with affective relations, with a sense of liberty to “dream, to plant, to tend the land.”

Agroecology is an ontological, epistemological, and fundamentally affective practice that emerges from acts of peasant resistance, shaping and being shaped by material and immaterial territories. Today, as part of the MST’s demand for popular agrarian reform, the movement’s agroecological framing and practices expand the meaning of the struggle for land (Rosset and Martínez-Torres, 2014). The MST’s vision is more than access to land—grounded in agroecology, it demands radical changes in the way we relate to food and agriculture. It is impossible to separate the way peasants think about their territories from their conception of agroecology. This point was made clearly by Genilda, who described the place of agroecology within the school:

Here Genilda emphasizes agroecology as a set of affective relationships: Agroecology is a form of care, for oneself, for others, for physical, and social structures. It’s from this perspective that one can see the emphasis that political ecologists of emotion place on how power mediates relationships of care intersecting with agrarian geographers’ attention to overlapping forms of territory. The emphasis that the new school intends to give to agroecology comes from the fact that the MST sees the agroecological transition as an important strategy in the dispute for material and immaterial territories with agribusiness in the south of Minas Gerais. According to the state leader of the movement Tuíra Tule, in an interview with Jornal Brasil de Fato: “the idea is for the school to be the agroecology hub for the south and southwest region of Minas Gerais, so that the space can strengthen public policies in agroecology, and be the pivot of others, thus strengthening the denunciations of agribusiness, of work analogous to slavery in an intensive way in the southern region of Minas Gerais.” María José describes what this process has looked like. “Through this process of consolidating the school, we’ve been able to advance, since 2020, the creation of a ‘pole’ of agroecology and organic production in southern Minas, and this pole turned into a state law that brought together more than 50 organizations. So, this pole also was one of the biggest factors pushing us to think about an agroecological school. This was why a dormitory was created, as we’d like to be a center of political training around agroecology, a reference point in the region.” What Maria José describes is how the school has helped anchor an agroecological “pole,” known as the Agroecological and Organic Production Center (PASSOMG) in the South and Southwest of Minas Gerais, which was created on September 23, 2021, by Law no. 23,939. The objective of PASSOMG is to promote and foster the development of agroecology and organic production in the South and Southwest regions of the state of Minas Gerais, as stipulated in the early State Policy on Agroecology and Organic Production (PEAPO) (Law No. 21,146, created on January 14, 2014). In addition to the MST, PASSOMG is made up of dozens of other movements, educational institutions, and technical assistance bodies. The “new version” of the Eduardo Galeano School therefore emerges as a space where PASSOMG members will undergo training in agroecology, part of the dispute for immaterial territories, with the purpose of interfering in the production of material territories.

The struggle over land is never simply about access to land, but also over its value in the cultural imaginary. The destruction and reconstitution of the Escola Popular Eduardo Galeano brings into conflict the multiplicity of values that converging forms of territory hold for different groups. For the state and landed elite, the school and its territory constituted a threat to the expansion of agribusiness and its coffee plantations. Similarly, the agroecological focus of the Eduardo Galeano Escola Popular was in direct conflict with the broader rural education model of the traditional municipal education system. For MST activists, the school and its territory epitomized radical hope, and the possibility of using education to advance agroecological practices. The destruction and reconstruction of the school sits at the convergence of these conflicting understandings of affective relations, immaterial and material territory.

Bringing together insights from the political ecologies of education and emotion, as well from Brazilian agrarian geography illuminates key moments in the school’s transformation. First, from a political ecology of emotion perspective, we witnessed how moral outrage can be harnessed to build social and material relationships. The destruction of the school struck a nerve within domestic Brazilian society, as well as among global allies. Images and videos of the school’s demolition provoked a sense of moral outrage, which helped precipitate a grassroots solidarity campaign. The community received donations of material resources and labor through mobilizing this solidarity network. For political ecologists of education and agrarian geographers, this insight is critical as it demonstrates how activists can mobilize social networks to help advance grassroots spaces of critical food systems education. Similarly, these optics draw into focus the importance of the physicality of the school, and the land it was on, which constituted a critical space for mobilizing and political training. Educational spaces, political ecologists can now see, are ones whose political work is achieved through the affective labor of territoriality. Even once the state stopped supporting educational activities in the school, MST educators continued to use it for political education. The school also held a particularly important place in the community, and region, given its agroecological focus. By seeding new perspectives on agroecology, techniques of land management, and visions for the future, the school can be seen as occupying the convergence affective relations, immaterial and material territories.

The audio data collected during this study are not publicly available due to privacy concerns. However, transcripts of the audio data are available upon request. Interested researchers can contact the corresponding author for access to these transcripts, subject to ethical approval and data use agreements.

The authors would like to thank the journal editors, special issue conveners and reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. Heartfelt gratitude is also extended to the activists in Quilombo Campo Grande for their time and energy, and for sharing their experiences, strength, and hope.

There are no funding sources to report.

The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Substantial contributions to conception and design: DM, BMF, EC.

Acquisition of data: DM, BMF, EC.

Analysis and interpretation of data: DM, BMF, EC.

Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content: DM, BMF, EC.

Final approval of the version to be published: DM, BMF, EC.

How to cite this article: Meek, D, Fernandes, BM, Coca, E. 2024. Agroecological education on contested ground: Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement and the politics of knowledge. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 12(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2024.00019

Domain Editor-in-Chief: Alastair Iles, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Knowledge Domain: Sustainability Transitions

Part of an Elementa Special Feature: Ways of Knowing and Being for Agroecology Transitions