Brazilian Agrarian Social Movements

Rebecca Tarlau is a Postdoctoral Scholar in Education at Stanford University, affiliated with the Lemann Center for Educational Entrepreneurship and Innovation in Brazil. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Studies from the UC-Berkeley Graduate School of Education and a B.A. in Anthropology and Latin American Studies from the University of Michigan. Rebecca’s research focuses on the relationship between states, social movements, and educational reform. Her scholarship engages in debates in the fields of political sociology, international and comparative education, critical pedagogy, global and transnational sociology, and social theory. Anthony Pahnke is currently employed as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Political Science and Environmental Studies at St Olaf College, Northfield Minnesota. He spent roughly two years in Brazil, researching state and MST practices in education, agrarian reform, and agricultural production. His interests extend beyond social movements to include political economy, state theory, and qualitative methods.

• 1. Understanding rural resistance: contemporary mobilization in the Brazilian countryside 2. Institutionalizing economies of opposition: explaining and evaluating the success of the MST’s cooperatives and agroecological repeasantization 3. Rural unions and the struggle for land in Brazil 4. Engaging the Brazilian state: the Belo Monte dam and the struggle for political voice 5. Education of the countryside at a crossroads: rural social movements and national policy reform in Brazil 6. Learning as territoriality: the political ecology of education in the Brazilian landless workers’ movement 7. The Landless invading the landless: participation, coercion, and agrarian social movements in the cacao lands of southern Bahia, Brazil 8. The Brazilian quilombo: ‘race’, community and land in space and time 9. Can urban migration contribute to rural resistance? Indigenous mobilization in the Middle Rio Negro, Amazonas, Brazil 10. Lula’s assault on rural patronage: Zero Hunger, ethnic mobilization and the deployment of pilgrimage 11. Managing transience: Bolsa Família and its subjects in an MST landless settlement