People’s education ‘was subversive’. Spaces and struggles of Brazilian Movimento de Cultura Popular towards radical and decolonized geographies of education

This paper addresses spaces and struggles of often-quoted but little-studied 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, in 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 current scholarship on critical geographies and spaces of education, this paper is based on new archives and makes a twofold argument. First, MCP contributed to build a geographical imagination challenging what recent works call a racialised ‘making land’ in Recife, by rehabilitating places of socially and racially discriminated groups. Second, the MCP case shows that the 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 characterises most related scholarship and calling to nourish geographies of education by addressing new cases in other cultures, other languages and other ‘Souths’.