On September 15, 2025, at 4:00 p.m., the Métis Convida edition will feature Alex Flynn, a professor at the University of California (UCLA), who will present the research "Paths to Utopia: Temporalities of Transformation in the Landless Workers' Movement."
Founded in 1984, the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has become an international reference for the struggle for agrarian reform. For forty years, the MST has represented a beacon of hope, and while other progressive movements have faded, it remains reinvigorated: 450,000 families settled; more than half a million people with access to land and housing security. Yet, members of the movement speak of agrarian reform and the MST itself as both a desire and a contradiction. The utopian nature of the movement is discussed, both as an impossibility and as a future solution—in other words: a dream, but also a device. How can we understand such contradictions? How do the linear contours of a utopian politics intersect with the forms and flows of an ongoing generational struggle taking place on the land? From a long-term ethnographic perspective, this talk examines how productive internal tensions between utopian ideals and emerging counter-utopian practices contribute to the movement's longevity, beyond its recognized strong organization and collective vision. Over the course of forty years, the lived experience of the struggle, unlike a performative rupture, is rooted in a time that extends and expands through the embodied actions of communities and their relationship with the land. In this sense, activism is considered not a momentary act, but rather a relational and ongoing practice—in which even the smallest community actions reverberate.
The event is organized within the scope of the thematic project Métis - Arts and Semantics of Creation and Memory, funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), and aims to bridge different subfields within Anthropology through the notion of creation, understood in a broader sense.
The event will take place in the auditorium of the Image and Sound Laboratory in Anthropology (LISA-USP), located at Rua do Anfiteatro, No. 181, Favo/Room 10, Cidade Universitária, SP.
Free admission, subject to space limitations.
No registration required.