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Based on an ethnography developed with social movements derived from the eviction process of an old popular district in the city of São José dos Campos, São Paulo, Brazil, we analyze how an idea of neighborship is applied to the processes of struggle and their outcomes. In 2004, a land of over 1,000,000 m2, owned by a bankrupt industry, was occupied by an entire district of over 5,000 people. This "illegal" occupation had been going on for almost 8 years when a court decision ordered the land to be vacated. The case of the Pinheirinho dos Palmares neighborhood, as it was known, became an emblematic example of Brazilian housing policies, with its violent eviction drawing the entire country's attention. This article deals with the struggles that the evicted residents started and that resulted, at the end of almost 5 years, in the construction of a new district by the state, based on a new housing program. We are going to analyze how concerns about organizing the new neighborship from the old neighborhood relations were fundamental in the geographical and architectural production of the new district. The article seeks to intertwine the notions of resistance and neighborship, responsible for the new configuration of the district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Brazil, many women are victims of different forms of domestic violence, which can be physical, psychological, moral, sexual and patrimonial. Women victims of domestic violence tend to look for close people to ask for help to get out of the situation, therefore, an informal support network can be an important tool for women to feel protected and ask for help from public organizations. Given that solidarity economic enterprises (SEE) formed only by women are a space for women to strengthen each other, where they socialize and can create bonds, they can also serve as an informal support network for the women who form them, in addition to fostering their financial autonomy. The objective of this article is to identify whether SEE can be part of a support network for women, from the perspective of the women who form them. To this end, three SEE of women were investigated in the brazilian municipality of Araraquara, which has an important history of social movements and public policies aimed at the social and solidarity economy. From the semi-structured interviews carried out with 11 women from three of these SEE, it was possible to obtain results that explain what happens in the empirical field in relation to the theory, such as that women feel comfortable and trust each other, but at the same time At the same time, they do not identify patrimonial violence as violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of perceived injustice, a huge number of intense anti-World Cup movements took place throughout almost every host city from June 2013 to July 2014 in Brazil. Over a million Brazilians joined anti-World Cup protests in more than 100 cities throughout Brazil in early July 2013, and this civil resistance lasted until the beginning of the World Cup. After the Cup, a number of violent protests in Rio de Janeiro against the 2016 Olympics occurred as well, and these produced far more controversy over the event. This study examines the emergence of social movements against the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games held in Brazil. Despite the importance of the subject, there has been a scarcity of literature addressing networked social movements in Brazil that opposed mega-sporting events and how this relates to theoretical debates about differentiated citizenship and the right to the city. To fill this gap, this article aims to explore the characteristics of protests. Drawing on an analysis of archival sources and interviews conducted during fieldwork in Brazil, this study shows that such demonstrations can be best seen as “networked social movements” that had been struggling for the asymmetric distribution of rights around the neoliberal mega-events. These networked social movements entailed the characteristics of the right-tothe-city movements that intended to subvert the social systems of differentiated citizenship in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contexts where political corruption is endemic, why would political elites build state capacity to prosecute corruption? Prior studies emphasize exogenous pressure from social movements or international organizations and the rise of political leaders committed to fighting corruption. While important, these factors are not sufficient to explain the case of Brazil, where politicians empowered investigative bureaucracies, even though several political elites later became victims of prosecution. Drawing on document analysis of charges and sentences and on 110 in-depth interviews with prosecutors, judges, and politicians, I develop a framework that focuses on the processes through which corruption is criminalized on the ground. By examining the initiatives of politicians in interaction with the actions of civil servants who investigate and prosecute cases of corruption, I show that political elites empowered investigators because, at the time, these steps seemed innocuous. Prosecutors later reframed how they talked about corruption—getting other colleagues to pay attention to this issue—and learned new strategies to uncover corruption schemes, but these changes happened under the radar: they were not visible to politicians. Popular pressure also led courts to broaden the definition of corruption and lower the threshold of evidence for it, but these decisions took place after the politicians' actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an overview of the rise of Bolsonarismo in Brazil, a far-right movement associated with former President Jair Bolsonaro. It discusses the unique historical roots of the movement and its connection to global far-right forces. The article also examines the formation of Brazil's new right, which defends exclusionary inequalities and conservative values, and utilizes information technologies to spread disinformation. It highlights the role of various actors, such as the military, evangelicals, and agribusiness, in the consolidation of Bolsonarismo. The article argues that while there are global influences, it is important to understand Bolsonarismo as a phenomenon with solid local foundations. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the rise of an anti-gender movement in Brazil and its impact on gender studies and academic freedom. The movement gained momentum with the election of far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, who targeted universities and promoted an ideology against gender studies. Despite these challenges, there has been resistance and scholarship production within universities. Brazilian universities have undergone significant changes in the past two decades, with the expansion of public universities and the implementation of quotas for marginalized groups. The controversy surrounding Judith Butler's talks served as a focal point for both the right and the left, with the right using it to mobilize their movement and the left using it to expose attacks against feminist, gender, and queer studies. While the far-right discourse has created a challenging climate for teaching and debating these topics, there is also a growing resistance and mobilization to defend gender studies. Brazil is a country with a strong tradition of fighting for democracy, but also extreme polarization. The movement represented by Bolsonaro is likely to reorganize, but there is a new generation of younger people who are expressing themselves and advocating for feminism and LGBTQIA+ rights. The resistance to ongoing assaults on gender studies and the visibility of these movements suggest that support for queer and gender studies is growing in Brazil. [Extracted from the article]

The Brazilian military-corporate dictatorship faced the resistance and mobilization of several marginalized groups. In this article, we reconstruct the subaltern memories of Black and poor women from the outskirts of São Paulo who participated in Christian Base Communities and the Cost-of-Living Movement, and we show how their mobilization was supported by social movements across the country. Despite their dimension and impact, a report by the Brazilian National Truth Commission fails to recognize their role in the country's democratic transition and the violence suffered by marginalized groups. These memories support a reflection on the myth of 'racial democracy' in Brazil as a general denial of racial violence throughout the country's history, which leaves intact its structures of injustice. We argue that the reconstruction of subaltern memories can have a significant impact on transitional justice and recover their critical role in democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a debate anchored in a dialogue between concepts of insurgent planning and humane urbanism and the idea of a subaltern urbanism through the lens of a critical reflection on the role of city-building professionals. The paper explores the idea of an insurgent urbanism as a collaborative praxis of city design and development that arises from the protagonism of marginalised communities and the accumulative knowledge of social movements, activists and scholars. It focuses on three different learning dimensions based on the experience of teaching/research actions developed at a self-organised squat in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil between 2018 and 2022. Dialoguing with ideas of social learning, it shows that these practices have created a relevant exchange of different types of knowledge and have contributed to the development of other solutions that challenge the hegemonic and neoliberal city production and can therefore be seen as alternatives for the development of more egalitarian and imaginative futures that expand beyond the context of squats in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a written dialogue among four activists from the Emancipa Popular Education Movement in Brazil, following the principles of Freirean pedagogy as a 'circle of culture'. It delves into how popular knowledge can be experienced as popular power, narrating the history, struggles, and strategies employed by the Emancipa movement in their pursuit of democratizing Brazilian universities. The discussion is set within the context of Latin American structural inequalities and the issue of educational exclusion in Brazil. It emphasizes the vital role of contesting culture and knowledge as part of the movement's fight against social injustices perpetuated by peripheral capitalism, including racist violence and gender oppression. The paper adopts emancipatory pedagogy as the method to empower and mobilize grassroots efforts in this transformative endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis of utopia is an evil that has been installed for a long time, in a general way and particularly in Brazil, which has dragged down not only the social movements inherited from the past, but also those that wanted to emerge in such a bleak picture. This was the product of problems inherent to such groups, but fundamentally it was caused by the establishment of neoliberal hegemony, which will carry out a titanic effort to subjectify its predicates. Through this, it will crystallize its rationality as the only possible order, thus preventing the construction of a utopian horizon that can overcome it. A phenomenon that we will break down taking the Brazilian case as a witness, with a current approach but that takes up elements of the past in brushstrokes, on which we will weave our theoretical argument, showing how its introjection was central to building a warp of enormous consistency that imprisons most of the actors and movements that can constitute an alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Latin America, the land has been an important issue in driving political and social change since the end of the 15th century, when European conquistadores began their colonial rule, to the present. The purpose of this study is to examine the changing meaning of land, by looking at cases of the Latin America's most representative rural social movements, i.e. EZLN in Mexico and MST in Brazil. In particular, this study distinguishes two currents of environmentalism in Latin America: elitist environmentalism and grassroots environmentalism. The former understands nature as a natural resource that can be developed or nature that needs to be preserved from a human-centric point of view, based on the ‘modern Western view of nature.’The latter understands the environment from the perspective of 'socio-nature', which is not simply a nature that is used and appreciated by human beings, but a more-than-human ecological space, that is, a space where humans and nature coexist. In this context, the meaning of land demanded by Mexico's EZLN and Brazil's MST can be better understood from the perspective of grassroots environmentalism. Both the EZLN and the MST call for land reform, which is not limited to the sense that land is arable land in the economic and social sense that must be secured for capitalist production in the process of agricultural modernisation or under a globalised system of agricultural production. Rather, their demand for land is closely related to the demand for productive justice that can sustain a human life through alternative modes of production, rather than the current mainstream model of development, and the demand for recognition of the political space(territory) that can determine these alternative modes of production and ways of life. Thus, land in these movements can be understood as territory as a political and ecological space for alternative development, beyond the meaning of economic and social arable land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2005, Brazil's "pro-life" movement has increasingly invested in efforts to promote recognition of the juridical personhood of the "unborn," making it a key vehicle to advance its political vision and mobilize its constituents. The agenda has crystallized most clearly around various legislative proposals to institute a so-called Statute of the Unborn (Estatuto do Nascituro), which would effectively recognize fetuses and embryos as full citizens in the country, codifying rights that would trump those of other juridical subjects, particularly women. In this article, we offer a genealogy of this recent turn in pro-life activism, situating it at the nexus of shifting national and transnational political and organizational networks. In doing so, we build on a feminist literature linking constructions of fetal personhood with the diffusion of reproductive technologies, understanding these broadly to include not just biomedical technologies but also technologies of reproductive governance. Drawing on archival research, we begin by tracing how Brazilian antiabortion activists' historic articulation with transnational pro-life, "pro-family" networks facilitated their appropriation of transnational technologies of reproductive governance, contributing directly to their current strategic prioritization of the juridical rights and personhood of the unborn. We then explore the contours of national debates on the matter through an analysis of various bills to codify these, introduced to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies since 1978. We pay particular attention to debates surrounding the proposed statute, underscoring its resonance with broader social movement strategies associated with identity politics and vulnerable groups in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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