CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Fierro, Alberto |
|---|---|
| Title | In the Struggle for Radical Knowledge: Autoethnography and Collective Militant Research with the MTST - Homeless Workers' Movement |
| Summary | The dissertation offers an autoethnographic narrative of my encounter with the Brazilian social movement Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST) – Homeless Workers’ Movement. The MTST has been struggling for more than twenty years for the right to housing. It organizes the people living in Brazilian cities’ peripheries to fight for dignity, equality and against the structural hierarchies of class, race, and gender. The puzzles of the dissertation arouse within the MTST occupations when militants asked me difficult questions and challenged me. The narrative tells of the encounter between colonized and colonial subject positions. The central question is: how can Western activist researchers develop a transformative relationship with social movements from the Global South? Dominant subjectivities (re)produce structural oppressions in their everyday life. Thus, I focus on how researchers align with the movements they support: how do gringo ethnographers start struggling against oppressions together with the oppressed? The dissertation employs three concepts: fragility, the everyday, and (self)transformation. After having situated them within a Black feminist and critical framework, I use them to address the tensions resulting from my encounter with the MTST. Fragility illustrates how dominant subjects feel when they are made to understand they reproduce hierarchies. The everyday represents a heuristic tool to conceptualize both the reproduction of structural oppression – in the unreflected repetition – and the occupations as sites where hierarchies are challenged through resisting routines – like chanting, demonstrating, collectively cooking, etc. Finally, (self)transformation theorizes the unlearning process of dominant subjects. The narrative is structured around three phases. First, I describe the initial months in the occupations and how I discovered to inhabit a colonial positionality. Then, I interweave memories from Brazil with a student occupation in Kossuth square, Budapest. Mixing Hungary and Brazil helps focus on how the process of discovery and unlearning crucially hinges on space and context. Finally, I tell how I attempted at developing more participatory research with the MTST approximately one year after the first encounter. The genre of the dissertation is autoethnographic because of representation problems. Militants made me understand how my research was deemed to objectify them. Thus, I decided to employ the self as a source of deconstruction. Inevitably, I do also represent militants and their struggle. The narrative reflects on how difficult it is for Western researchers to listen to the anger of the oppressed. However, the autoethnographic focus has problems. The dominant subject who ‘discovers’ social hierarchies risks creating a new form of hierarchy: between those who know and therefore ‘check on themselves’ and those who do not. In the end, this re-centers the white, male, Western subject. The narrative – divided into evocative and analytic fragments – tackles this tension. I argue that the turning to the self of the dominant must represent a temporary step, after which comes collective militant research – the participatory effort to research and struggle together. In this way, activist scholars stop objectifying their comrades and may develop useful knowledge for the struggle. The dissertation shows that learning to unlearn is a step towards the decolonization of the mind. Dominant subjects should accept to feel fragile but never try to overcome this emotion. In fact, (self)transformation is an unfinished project, and the joint effort at developing decolonized epistemologies takes place through practicing daily dialogue and experiencing rupturing joys. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/fierro_alberto.pdf |
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