This blog post is the first in what will be a series under the heading A network of networks. These posts will introduce networks of geographers, and groups with geographical interests, from across Latin America. We hope this series will help to further the project of the LAG-UK network as a resource for deepening the links between the geographical communities in the UK and Latin America. If you would like to introduce a network in this series, contact lagukblog@gmail.com
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND URBAN SPACE (MSEU) is a research group based in Recife that has for 20 years critiqued the perversity of the Brazilian territorial model.
Movimentos Sociais e Espaço Urbano (MSEU) was founded in 2000, and registered as a research group with the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). Since then it has continuously challenged the persistence of socio-territorial inequalities and injustices in Brazilian space-time, as well as the hegemonic interests which push back against the social feats of Brazil and Brazilians.
520 years after its insertion into the world market by Europeans, Brazil is one of the most unequal and unjust countries in the world. Its territory continues to be used as a resource for the purely economic interests of capitalism, with the unrelenting support of Brazil’s “backward” elites. Aiming to accumulate wealth at all costs, they have devastated nature and fragmented, exploited and neutralized indigenous people and subaltern social classes that do not immediately serve capitalist relations of being (production-distribution-circulation-consumption) and thinking (the imposition of neoliberal reason on the world).
The socio-territorial contradictions of uneven historical-geographical development sharpened with the neoliberal trend in the Northern Hemisphere in the 2000s. It was in this context, and among rising conflicts and social tensions in Brazil, that MSEU was created by Prof. Cláudio Jorge Moura de Castilho and his students at the Department of Geographic Sciences at the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife.
In this context, and in pursuit of an ethical political science, MSEU has denounced the use of the territory by the prevailing economic logic of capitalist technical-instrumental rationality. MSEU has sought to value and give voice to men and women in permanent struggle to assert their interests and construct another rationality, which upholds the use of the territory as shelter and social protection.
MSEU’s work has included studies and research on the major geographic-ecological problems of Brazilian socio-economic and territorial formation of Brazil; advisory activities with progressive social movements in the city and in rural areas; holding seminars and colloquia; national and international academic writing; and the publication of the e-journal Movimentos Sociais e Dinâmicas Espaciais. MSEU aims towards a praxis that contributes to transforming current land use in Brazil.
Transforming used territory requires free, autonomous and democratic dialogue between historical experiences of resistance, and the economistic order. MSEU has therefore sought to connect government and non-governmental institutions to bring to light alternative projects for the use of territory, that might meet the real needs of Brazilians.
In doing engaged political science as transformational praxis, MSEU has tackled the human condition of people who, through social mobilizations founded in historical practice and territorial experience, struggle to consolidate their occupation and/or urbanization of socially claimed land in the city.
MSEU works with students in public and private secondary schools to contribute to citizenship education of students preparing to enter university. MSEU also works with indigenous peoples and quilombolas, among other social actors, to develop dialogic-pedagogic relations that reinforce the transformative values of embedded in each place of existence. Together, these can contribute to effective social change, to value used territory as shelter and social protection.
The main lines of research currently developed with the MSEU are as follows: Space and Citizenship; Planning and Sustainable Development in Urban Environments; Public Policies and Space Production; Space Work, Consumption and Production. MSEU has published a dossier on covid-19, and can be followed on Instagram.
“Education does not change the world. Education changes people. People change the world” (Paulo Freire)
“Only when we are taught by reality can we change it” (Bertold Brecht)