Educação do Campo [Education for and by the countryside] as a political project in the context of the struggle for land in Brazil

Latin American and Brazilian rural social movements believe that significant social transformation requires the collective construction of a political project of an historical character. Education is conceived as an historical–cultural and political project to transform the peasantry into an historical subject through emancipatory educational–pedagogical praxis. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), the most emblematic peasant movement in Brazil, has played the leading role in this debate, which also includes many other peasant organizations. The MST has identified education as the key element in forging an historical–political actor out of the landless peasantry. This is articulated through the struggle for education for rural peoples, and along a theoretical–epistemic axis that revolves around the emergent concept of Educação do Campo (‘Education for and by the Countryside’). I ask how the MST conceptualizes education, and what the role is of education in strengthening peasant resistance and sharpening the dispute between political projects for the countryside. I focus on the epistemic dimensions of the concepts of education and pedagogy in the trajectory of the MST in Brazil, and I examine Educação do Campo as an educational-political project and in terms of policy conquests in the political dispute between the rival political projects for the Brazilian countryside of peasants and capital.     

Cross-Currents: Elizabeth von Arnim,Max Beerbohm and George Bernard Shaw

Abstract

When Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel Introduction to Sally appeared in 1926, the critical response was divided. Dame Ethel Smyth may have told von Arnim the book was her ‘masterpiece’ but some were less convinced; the reviewer in Punch, for instance, considered it ‘a coarse-grained fantasy’. By situating Introduction to Sally in a wider literary context that includes Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911 Beerbohm, Max (1964a), ‘To Reggie Turner, 3 November 1911’, in Rupert Hart-Davis (ed.), Letters to Reggie Turner, London: Davis, p. 126. [Google Scholar]) and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914 Shaw, George Bernard (1914), ‘Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol xxxi, (5). [Google Scholar]), this article explores the personal connections between these three authors and the thematic cross-currents in these texts. Is von Arnim’s novel really as ‘coarse’ and ‘vulgar’ as some earlier critics suggest? Or is it a novel that successfully mixes the plausible with the artificial, the comic and the socially catastrophic, in ways that, more than a decade later, resonate with the work of her friends to highlight several continuing preoccupations?     

The Origins of the European Coalition for Vision: Exploring the Formation of a Network

Despite growing interest in EU-level transnational networks, there is little understanding about how these form. This article investigates the formation of one network—the European Coalition for Vision (ECV). Using document analysis of 100 email exchanges, 12 semi-structured interviews, and observation of 5 ECV meetings, it identifies environmental and organizational triggers, most important to the creation of the ECV. Findings show that while environmental triggers played a role in ECV formation, organizational triggers were crucial. In particular, the presence of network leaders, a network entrepreneur and a network mentor were vital for the successful creation of the network.     

Looking beyond the economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin's voting coalition

The arrest of the protest punk band Pussy Riot (PR) in March 2012 and the subsequent prosecution of three band members pose a significant puzzle for political science. Although PR's performances presented a coherent alternative to the Putin regime's image of Russian reality, it was unlikely that the discordant music and crude lyrics of their art protest would inspire Russian society to take to the streets. Yet, the regime mounted a very visible prosecution against the three young women. We argue that the trial marked a shift in the Kremlin's strategy to shape state–society relations. In the face of declining economic conditions and social unrest, the PR trial encapsulated the Kremlin's renewed focus on three related mechanisms to insure social support: coercion, alliance building, and symbolic politics. The PR trial afforded the Kremlin an important opportunity to simultaneously redefine its loyal constituency, secure the Church–state relationship, and stigmatize the opposition.     

Corruption and identity politics in divided societies

Corruption is a major problem for populations in various parts of the world. This article argues that to understand the problems and dynamics of corruption, we need to understand how discourses and practices of corruption (and anti-corruption efforts) are intertwined with the construction and contestations of identity. Identity politics is a salient feature in peaceful political struggles, as well as in contemporary armed conflicts, which are often characterised by the politicisation of collective identity (ethnic, national, religious) for the violent pursuit of power. The article outlines and discusses four ways in which identity politics and corruption intersect. First, it points to the often blurred lines between private and collective benefit from corruption, revealing the implications of group identity for how corruption is conceptualised. Second, it shows how corruption may exacerbate grievances along identity lines. Third, it highlights how corruption can be used strategically in identity-based conflicts. Finally, it explores how corruption may encourage cross-ethnic solidarity and mobilisation that defy conflict divides.     

Workers,state, and development in Brazil: powers of labour,chains of value

This paper examines the significance of landscape and memory in peasant–state relations in Eritrea since independence in the early 1990s. During this period, people were being resettled around cultivable land in the western lowlands as a means of recuperating land and society after prolonged warfare. Projects of statemaking in Eritrea, involving both refugee resettlement and agrarian development, have drawn from a national narrative of lost fertility and deforestation caused by generations of colonial extraction and violence. This paper explores how shared memories of environmental change, an ecological nostalgia, become a means through which people from diverse ethno-linguistic, religious, and regional backgrounds come together to imagine a collective future based in creating livelihood from farm land. However, as people reclaim remembered landscapes and face the challenges of rebuilding communities and livelihoods during a time of tense political and economic change, their ideas of a shared future diverge from state-led projects of nation-building. This article argues that ecological nostalgia legitimises state interventions into rural livelihoods but also provides a means for people to speak and critique the state under conditions of increasing fear and silencing.     

Grabbing back: essays against the global land grab

ABSTRACT

Extensive research, mainly undertaken by nutrition scientists and economists, indicates that the presence of a home garden is positively associated with improved household nutrition in rural households of the global South. However, this literature is relatively silent on the contexts that influence home garden uptake. This is problematic given rapidly changing social and economic landscapes, which reshape the place and scope for home gardens within households’ livelihood and food provisioning arrangements. Original research from Myanmar reported here reveals that emergent socio-economic contexts for rural households are posing heightened challenges for home gardens to contribute to food and nutrition security.     

Queer love economies: Making trans/feminist film in precarious times

In this essay, the authors, all experimental filmmakers, discuss the impact of Born in Flames on their own work, as well as the ways their various projects pick up, extend, or change the political questions raised by the film. The relationships of experimental film to political community and community building are explored, particularly in the context of queer, feminist, trans, anti-racist politics and media.     

Partidos políticos e innovación democrática: más allá de purezas y perversiones

This article aims to review the conceptual import of the term “political mediation”, to shed light on the analytical reach of indirect politics, whose scope of possibilities has been usually thought of as confined within the opposites of political representation and clientelism. An analytical exercise is put forth as a possible and tentative means not only to establish a vocabulary which may be more sensitive towards present time demands, but also to –in Bunge's words– initially allow for the reinterpretation of older symbols of our political vocabulary. Towards this goal, besides a linguistic and conceptual itinerary of the term “mediation”, each of the three analytical dimensions of indirect politics is developed, favoring dialogue with theories of representation, which channels into an analytical model we call the “cube of indirect politics”. The article ends with a brief case-classification exercise aimed at showing the displacement produced by the model in the understanding of given experiences in indirect politics.     

Class,nation and religion: changing nature of Akali Dal politics in Punjab,India

The Akali Dal is the best organised political party in Punjab and has ruled over Punjab for a longer period than any other political party since the creation of the Punjabi-speaking state in 1966. It articulates aspirations of Punjabi regional nationalism along with trying to protect the interests of the Sikhs as a religious minority in India and abroad. As a part of shaping Punjab's economic future, it deals with the pressures of Indian and global capitalism. This paper is an attempt to track the multi-faceted pressures of class, religion and nationalism in the way Akali Dal negotiates its politics in Indian federalism.