Pathways to Utopia explores how Brazil's Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST), against all odds, has endured for forty years as one of the world's largest social movements—while transforming the way we understand the temporality of activism. Taking his cue from MST members and their generational struggle for land and justice, anthropologist Alex Ungprateeb Flynn reveals how the movement's longevity stems not only from its strong organization and collective vision but also from the productive tensions between established utopian ideals and emerging counter-utopian practices. Perceived by some as a shortcoming, this friction has proven to be a generative force, sparking creative gestures that reimagine social relations and ensuring the MST's adaptability in an ever-changing political landscape.
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Researching collaboratively with activists and artists in Brazil since 2007, Alex explores the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts, theorizing knowledge production, social and aesthetic dimensions of form, and the temporality of utopia. He is the author of the award-winning Taking Form, Making Worlds (University of Texas Press, 2022) and Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil (Indiana University Press, 2025). Committed to an experimental ethnographic approach, he also works as a curator; his exhibition Construction, Occupation is currently on view at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles. In 2017, he received São Paulo's APCA Trophy in recognition of his curatorial work.
This event is free and open to the public.
