Lectio praecursoria

Research on social movements in Brazil is a fruitful area that brings up debate and discussion about the ways in which marginalised and underrepresented sectors of society succeed in demanding and achieving rights. The most common research approaches include attempts to explain the action of such organisations, their protest repertoires as well as strategic and tactical perspectives developed by social movements. The question guiding this chapter is thus: How do these types of research contribute to make social movements’ demands visible in the public space, considering the contexts of inequality and criminalisation of social movements in Brazil? In this sense, the text problematises the relations between research and the objectives of social movements, centring on the case of the Landless Workers Movement (MST), the main organisation acting in the struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil. We do this by analysing how postgraduate programmes in Brazil relate to MST as subject of research, looking into approved master’s theses and doctoral dissertations in Brazilian universities during 2017.

Journal of Labor and SocietyVolume 22, Issue 4 p. 925-928 BOOK REVIEW A theory of strikes? Or strikes as actions in building workers' power? Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India: Popular Mobilisation in the Long Depression Jörg Nowak, Switzerland: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2019 Maurizio Atzeni, Maurizio Atzeni matzeniwork@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0001-8791-9033 Centre for Labour Relations, Argentinian National Research Council (CEIL/CONICET), CEIL-PIETTE, Buenos Aires, ArgentinaSearch for more papers by this author Maurizio Atzeni, Maurizio Atzeni matzeniwork@gmail.com orcid.org/0000-0001-8791-9033 Centre for Labour Relations, Argentinian National Research Council (CEIL/CONICET), CEIL-PIETTE, Buenos Aires, ArgentinaSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 October 2019 https://doi.org/10.1111/wusa.12451Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume22, Issue4December 2019Pages 925-928 RelatedInformation

Este trabajo aborda los conflictos ambientales que se generan por luchas en torno a la tierra y el agua, ante el avance de la frontera extractiva -monocultivos y megaminería, principalmente- desde la actuación de movimientos sociales de Brasil y Argentina. Considerando las corrientes del ambientalismo que entran en disputa por la apropiación de bienes naturales, argumentaremos cómo movimientos sociales de Brasil y Argentina evidencian la falacia del discurso capitalista hegemónico sobre la crisis ambiental. Tomaremos para ello movimientos referentes en cada país: el Movimiento de Trabajadores Rurales Sin Tierra (MST) de Brasil y los movimientos que resisten a la minería a gran escala -o megaminería- en Argentina. La caracterización del accionar de estos movimientos está sustentada en investigaciones que incluyeron entrevistas y trabajo de campo en estos territorios de resistencia. Consideramos que son estos conflictos y los actores sociales que los protagonizan, los que traen a la luz las desigualdades inherentes a la distribución de los impactos ambientales, que la retórica del desarrollo sustentable intenta invisibilizar con su concepción social integradora y amigable con el ambiente. Los conflictos ambientales brindan así la posibilidad de derrocar la imagen hegemónica de una crisis ambiental común a toda la humanidad y paralelamente, instalar la discusión sobre la legítima necesidad de apropiación de los bienes naturales comunes.

This article discusses the relationship between social movements and democracy in the last fifty years in Brazil. This research aims to analyze the influence of demonstrations and street protests, which took place between 1970 and 2020, on the Brazilian democratic process and party institutions. The analysis starts from the social struggles against the dictatorship and Catholic Church through the CEBs (Base Ecclesiastical Communities) at the end of the 1970s. The struggles for redemocratization and for popular participation in the 1980s are also analyzed. The networked social movements and the new social movements, according to Alain Touraine, are also objects of this research. It is observed that social movements influence not only institutions and the democratic process but also individual and collective identities that share their ideologies, which expressively altered the political game and institutions’ functioning.

Social media is being employed to build support for social, economic, and political justice (Selander et al. 2016; Vaast et al. 2014) in movements such as occupy Wall Street, violence against women's movement and global sustainability movement. These movements have used social media in ways that goes beyond simple communications. As social media allows people to produce and share user generated content, they enable a certain set of affordances of these technologies (Bharati et al 2015; Bharati et al 2014). The social media affordances, available to both collective and individual actors, translate into capabilities afforded to social movements (Tufecki 2014). Research on connective action has examined the effects of digital action repertoires on interaction and engagement such as in the Tea Party and Occupy movements (Agarwal et al. 2014; Selander et al. 2016). Social media can also facilitate mobilization of movement and participation by new volunteers and oftentimes provides a transnational character by diffusing actions beyond the virtual (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010). Conversation, an essential part of social movements, shapes “social life by altering individual and collective understandings, by creating and transforming social ties, by generating cultural materials that are then available for subsequent social interchange, and by establishing, obliterating, or shifting commitments on the part of participants&x201D; (Tilly 2002, p. 122). In a personal interaction that involves repeated organized interactions between individuals, typically, leads to shared values and trust. The role of social media technologies in furthering this conversation has to be studied and its' influence on social movement ascertained. A few scholars have started to investigate social media affordances and capabilities, especially focused on discourse, during contentious collective action. Still the research has been limited to studying mechanisms of participation, development of a sense of collective identity, creation of community, and framing of political discourse (Farrell 2012; Garrett 2006). Social media data on social movements can involve impersonal “like&x201D; and “share&x201D; to more engaged conversations. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube offer a wide communicative and discourse reach in networks with text, image, audio, and video data. This social media based big data, consisting mostly of unstructured data, comes in the form of social media posts, digital pictures and videos. The symposium will discuss how formal organizational structures and practices might be integrated with social media capabilities to reinforce and enhance social movement organizations as leaders in social change movements. It will explore the characteristics of social media discourse and assess the dynamics of social movements and, subsequent, impact on real-world protests. The symposium will also demonstrate how discourse analysis can be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns. The panel symposium will focus on theoretical and methodological challenges of social media analytics, big data and social movements. Panelists will engage the audience in an interactive discussion on: 1) Theoretical challenges: a. How and why are social movement recruitment and engagement mechanisms being impacted as a result of social media? b. How do we advance theory on social media and social movements when we are overwhelmed with social media based big data? c. What approach should we undertake if big data analysis contradicts most theories on social media and social movements? d. How do we address the issue of generalizability of social media and social movement research when data collection was limited to one social media platform, albeit involving big data? 2) Methodological challenges: a. What methodological approaches have worked in the analysis of social media, big data and social movements? b. How can discourse analysis be applied visually in order to understand communication patterns evident in social media-based big data? c. How can we employ social media analytics to investigate image and video data? d. What combinations of qualitative and quantitative methodologies be employed for big data and social media analytics in the context of social movements? e. What are the limitations of quantitative data analysis techniques, such as structural equation modeling, because of an extremely large sample size? f. What are the limitations of qualitative data analysis techniques as they become extremely labor intensive and, maybe even, impractical because of big data?

The environmental justice movement has proven to be an excellent tool for reshaping poor and minority communities. St. Gabriel, a predominantly African-American community in Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor used the momentum of the environmental justice movement to first, incorporate their town, and then, institute re-zoning and planning measures. The town’s momentum for positive change came from a hybrid of both traditional civil rights movements and current new social movements, such as the environmental movement. Traditional and new social justice movements serve to enhance one another, forming and then dispersing as the community problem is solved. These biodegradable movements are part of the process of social and environmental justice. Permeable, changeable social movements have an effective, pragmatic quality that are able to realize substantive physical community change. This case study of the new town of St Gabriel analyzes community change via social justice activism.

The presented discussion is part of an investigation about a Brazilian housing policy known as Minha Casa Minha Vida (My Home My Life) and its relations to the housing social movements in Brazil. Our fieldwork and literature review revealed that housing social movements are part of a different historical moment and, therefore, of a different conception of what they are and what they were made for. These movements, along with others, are considered "new social movements". Paying attention to how many times we have seen ourselves in front of this qualification, we examined the meaning of this novelty and its practical implications for the mobilization of these agents. These examinations led us necessarily to seek for understanding about the dynamics of cooptation and institutionalization of social movements. These are the goals of this text.

Thiago Elert Soares argues that a bridging needs to be constructed between the economic agendas proposed in the chapter with environmental justice agendas. Economic empowerment in itself is not sufficient to generate sustainable and equitable development. By linking environment protection to overall economic development, social movements in Brazil since the 1990s have already been successful in raising it to the forefront of national discussions. It recognises that if vulnerable and impoverished populations continue to be unevenly exposed to environmental risks and hazards, they will remain unable to effectively participate in the wider economy.

This paper is organized around two points. The first concerns the literature on environmental justice (EJ) studies and its lack of incorporation of social scientific theories and concepts concerning racism. This is surprising, given EJ studies' strong interest in challenging a form of racism - environmental racism. This, in turn, allows for a critique of theories of racism for their lack of attention to the ways in which society-environment relations structure racist practices and discourses, and a critique of scholars who have understated the continuing impact of racism on communities of color. The second point concerns the degree to which modernization has led to an improvement in the environmental impacts associated with market economies and their production systems. Drawing on ecological modernization, risk society, and the treadmill of production theories, I argue that, as with popular and scholarly views on racism, many scholars have overstated the level of progress society has made on this front. I also argue that this is largely because - via practices such as environmental racism and globalization - many of the worst dimensions of the market economy's externalities are out of sight and out of mind (due largely to spatial and residential segregation and international hazardous waste exports), making it possible to either ignore or dismiss claims to the contrary.

1. Achieving Social and Environmental Justice through the Many Dimensions of Globalisation: An Elusive or Achievable Quest? Shawkat Alam, Natalie Klein and Juliette Overland 2. 'Globalized Localisms': Three Phases of Environmental Governance for Biodiversity Protection, Lee Godden 3. Global Standards and Specific Needs: Protection of the Marine Environment Through Particularly Sensitive Sea Areas, Natalie Klein 4. Blue Oil: Water Resources, Social Justice and the International Law on Foreign Investment, Kate Miles 5. Economic Globalization: Rethinking Its Promises for Economic and Social Development from a Developing Country Perspective, Shawkat Alam 6. Standards in the WTO - Attitudes to Biotechnology, Joseph A. McMahon 7. Embedding the Neoliberal Transformation of Government Services through Trade in Services Agreements, Jane Kelsey 8. A Multi-Faceted Journey: Globalisation, Transnational Corporations and Corporate Social Responsibility, Juliette Overland 9. Globalisation and Intellectual Property Rights: The Struggle of Developing Countries to Influence TRIPS, Carlos M. Correa 10. Globalisation and Children's Rights: The Case of Child Labour, Sumaiya Khair 11. Gender and Globalisation: Engendering Social and Environmental Justice through Globalising Women's Human Rights, Erika George 12. ' Why do they Hate us? ... They Hate our freedoms': The Globalisation of Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism, Ben Saul 13. Harbingering a New Paradigm of Global Governance: The Role of NGOs in Shaping International Law and Relations in the 21st Century, M. Rafiqul Islam 14. The Challenges of Globalisation and International Law: The Way Forward, Ved P Nanda

Theory, Practice and ‘External Actors’ in the Making of New Urban Social Movements in Brazil

ABSTRACTIn this article, we analyse how students used social media as a form of human–technology interaction for the organization, development, and expansion of activities in 4 social movements in Brazil. We analysed 122 Facebook pages maintained by the Four Movements using the cultural-historical activity theory framework and focused on the notion of collaborative agency in the development of the movements. We performed a qualitative analysis of this data to understand both how the movements developed and the results that the students obtained. Our findings suggest that by acting collaboratively, students expanded activities to other contexts.

To understand the role of social movements in Brazil in the new millennium some preliminary considerations about the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural setting in which these movements take place are in order, so as to position these actions in a Latin American context. Latin America has presented different national answers to cyclical economic crises, especially the one that befell the globalized world at the end of 2008. Significant changes in the global scenario, both international (globalization, wars, crises, new hegemonic disputes, etc.) as well as changes at the regional level (a relatively more autonomous repositioning of Latin America in the world system) have resulted in a sociopolitical context which is both diverse and differentiated from that of previous decades, from an economic, social, and political viewpoint as well as being manifested in countless cultural innovations.

In Brazil, progressive forces have used popular social movements to challenge entrenched decision-making elites and force policy change. Brazil's economy grew and exports flowed, and by the twenty-first century, Brazil was one of the up and coming economies in the world that formed part of the newly classified rapidly developing BRIC countries. A new postneoliberal capitalist model of development was being implemented in Brazil. In 2016, hundreds of thousands of Brazilians again took to the street to protest governmental corruption and to call for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, and they were met by another social movement resisting what those supporting the government said was a coup. From 1984 on, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) mobilized thousands of poor rural workers and others marginalized by the economic system to create what came to be the largest social movement in Latin America. The interaction between the MST and the PT is also instructive.

The long June: the 2013 mobilizations and the future of social movements in Brazil