Popular education is an act of love: the role of political formation in climate justice movements

• In Event: 30421 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8. Uncertain Knowledge and their Epistemic Communities

Abstract

This paper is part of a larger ongoing project that examines the interplay of Brazilian sociology and socio-environmental movements. I participated in the “Curso de Energia” (Course on Energy) between 2019-2022. The course is a partnership between the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (Movement of People Affected by Dams or MAB) with the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Since 2008, 5 cohorts have graduated (each course spanning 2 years typically). Turma 5 was between 2019-2022, and brought together more than 70 people from 21 organizations, social movements, and unions from various countries across the Americas. My participation in this course served as the catalyst for this project. While this work began as a project about knowledge production and popular education; in June 2024, it shifted to focus more explicitly on climate justice. Here, I examine the following questions: 1) How could the study of social movements be transformed utilizing methodologies other than theoretically based analysis that is produced exclusively inside the university, and within the “Global North,” and what might this mean for organizing for water and climate justice? 2) What can be learned from the pedagogy and praxis of those who participated as professors and educators in MAB’s course on energy? 3) How is this political formation a part of a larger “translocal” struggle for climate justice? MAB offers crucial insights into the operation of systems of power and strategies of resistance for fighting climate justice. I contend that MAB offers crucial insights into the operation of systems of power and strategies of resistance. Purely technocratic approaches to solving climate change will fail if they do not account for both the lived and theoretical knowledge produced and articulated by the people most impacted and if they do not address the systemic causes of climate change.

Author

• Caitlin Schroering, University of North Carolina at Charlotte