This paper addresses spaces and struggles of Movimento de Cultura Popular (MCP), participated by famous educator Paulo Freire and inspired by radical geographers Josué de Castro and Manuel Correia de Andrade. This pioneering experience in People’s Education took place in Pernambuco, Northeastern Brazil, and was brutally shut down by the 1964 military coup, as MCP’s endeavours for literacy of workers, peasants, indigenous and Afro-descendant people were considered as a threat by local ruling classes. Extending scholarship on critical geographies and spaces of education, this paper is based on new archives and makes a twofold argument. First, MCP built a geographical imagination challenging what recent works call a racialized ‘making land’ in Recife and rehabilitating places of socially and racially discriminated groups. Second, the MCP case shows that spaces of socially transformative education are constituted by the places where people live, beyond the institutions that are formally entitled to perform these tasks. It questions current understandings of ‘alternative’ education as a field mostly concerning privileged people in so-called Global North, re-centring notions of class struggle, challenging the Anglocentrism that still characterizes most related scholarship and calling to nourish geographies of education by addressing new cases in other cultures, languages and ‘Souths’.
Federico Ferretti (Tue,) studied this question.