Insurgent Utopia: ontological praxis and the reconfiguration of the social imaginary

This article advances insurgent utopia as a conceptual and methodological intervention that reclaims the radical core of utopian thought from within colonial modernity. Rejecting technocratic domestication and teleological abstraction, it foregrounds subaltern epistemic agency, framing utopia as situated praxis enacted through struggle. A critical genealogy is traced – from the classical pursuit of eudaimonia and More's negation of place, through Rousseau's civic pedagogy and Marx's dialectical horizon, to Bloch's ontology of the not-yet – situating insurgent utopia as an ontological surplus animating political imagination from below. Its most concrete elaboration lies in Latin American pedagogical traditions: in Freire's inédito viável and in the praxis of Brazil's Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The MST's educational and territorial praxis demonstrates this framework as a counter-hegemonic grammar that reconfigures time, pluralises futures and reclaims possibility.