This university must be built: the praxis of the Latin American Institute of Agroecology “Paulo Freire”

For Latin American and Caribbean social movements, agroecology is a starting point for fundamentally different social and economic relations. As a feminist, anti-imperialist, decolonial, and care practice, agroecology creates a value system at odds with today’s imperial capitalist order, which has proven to be impervious to social, cultural and ecological controls. During the mid 2000s, a unique arrangement led a major bloc of social movements to commit vast efforts to building a first-ever peasant university in the countryside of Venezuela, which would offer an engineering degree in agroecology. This article analyzes the construction of this experimental university and the productive tension between the agrarian social movements, who participated as students, educators, and pedagogical coordinators, and the Venezuelan state. Sovereign knowledge production – within and for movements – took place during the development of the peasant university. This article contributes to educational theory and the politics of knowledge by drawing out the lessons from this emblematic example of agroecology education, highlighting the roles of internationalism, peasant identity, self-determination, and organizational leadership.