Alex Ungprateeb Flynn (UCLA) "The Momentinho and the March: Temporalities of Struggle in Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement"

About

Drawing on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork with Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (MST), this talk presents material from the recently published Pathways to Utopia (Indiana University Press, 2025). Against accounts that locate political change in spectacular moments of rupture, the talk argues that transformation in the MST, one of the world's largest social movements, unfolds durationally — through the embodied rhythms of daily struggle and community solidarity. Drawing on Bergson's concept of durée, the talk traces the MST's own contested relationship to time: from the industrial temporality imposed by early movement organisers to the resistant, open-ended temporality of mística — the movement's practice of collective creative expression. At the heart of this argument are "counter-utopian practices": minoritarian gestures that rework structures from within, placing productive pressure on utopian ideals and raising larger questions about how we understand the scale and temporality of social transformation. Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA.