Justification work: The homeless workers’ movement and the pragmatic sociology of dissent in Brazil’s crisis

ABSTRACT

In the late 2000s, a number of analysts were optimistic about Brazil’s future. Their expectant analyses did not bear out, however, as a political and economic crisis developed just as Brazil was gearing up to host two mega-events, the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. This paper has two aims. The first is to deepen our understanding of the crisis through examining one of the foremost civil society actors to emerge in this period: the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem-Teto, MTST). The second is to use this case to consider the potential for the sociology of critical capacity - a field of theory that emerged out of the Political and Moral Sociology Research Group in Paris in the 1980s - to contribute to theorising the ‘justification work’ of social movements.

KEYWORDS:

• Brazil
• social movements
• homeless workers’ movement
• pragmatic sociology

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this paper was presented by Victor Albert at Cidades Liminares, at the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, in August 2016. We would like to thank the attendees there – and in particular Gabriel Feltran – for their helpful comments. A revised version was presented at a workshop in Helsinki, Finland, in September 2016. We would like to thank the organisers and other participants of this event, including Nelly Bekus and Oleg Zhuravlev for their suggestions. Tuomas Ylä-Anttila’s close reading of the text was especially useful as we re-edited it for submission. The two anonymous reviewers at EJCPS also gave insightful critiques and thoughtful feedback that decisively improved the quality of the text. Victor would like to acknowledge Marta Arretche, Shirley, and the Centre for Metropolitan Studies at the University of São Paulo, for their support of this project

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Victor Albert http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4356-6162

Notes

1 This is, of course, no mere rhetoric. For instance, the Institute of State Lands of the state of São Paulo found that a great number of the large farm-owners seized their land through land piracy (Mota & Lopez, 2015, pp. 953–954).

Additional information

Funding

Victor received funding via the São Paulo Research Foundation [grant number 2015/14474-0]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo.