Professor Alex Flynn of UCLA will present his research on "Paths to Utopia in the Landless Movement."

On September 15, 2025, at 4 p.m., the Métis Convida edition will feature Alex Flynn, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Flynn will present his research, "Paths to Utopia: Temporalities of Transformation in the Landless Movement."

Since its founding in 1984, the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has become an international benchmark for agrarian reform struggles. For forty years, the MST has been a beacon of hope. While other progressive movements have dissipated, the MST persists with renewed vigor, providing secure land and housing to more than half a million people and settling 450,000 families. Nevertheless, MST members speak of agrarian reform and the MST itself as both a desire and a contradiction. The utopian nature of the movement is discussed as both an impossibility and a potential solution: a dream and a strategy. How can we understand such contradictions? How do the linear contours of a utopian policy meet the forms and flows of a continuous generational struggle that takes 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. Unlike a performative rupture, the lived experience of struggle over forty years 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 not a momentary act but a continuous, relational practice in which even the smallest community actions reverberate.

The event is organized within the scope of the Métis thematic project — Arts and Semantics of Creation and Memory — funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The event aims to bring together different subfields of anthropology based on the notion of creation, understood in a broad sense.

• It will take place in the auditorium of the Laboratory of Image and Sound in Anthropology (LISA-USP) at Rua do Anfiteatro 181, sala 10, Cidade Universitária, São Paulo.
• Admission is free, but space is limited.
• No registration is required.