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Miriam in the communal room of an MST settlement located in the outskirts of the RJ metropolitan area.
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Scholar's Journal
During one of the first interviews I conducted, I found myself in the MST-Rio de Janeiro office. “Little by little, I was conquered by the movement,” the woman said, referring to the ideological shifts she experienced before finally deciding upon moving herself, her children, and her husband to the rural hinterlands of the state. The lack of employment opportunities made the city too difficult a place to live, so she decided upon the uncertain but hopeful future in an MST encampment. The family waited six years to earn the legal entitlement to the land, and by the time they got it, it was under her name and she had become one the statewide leaders of the movement.
Stories such as these are increasingly common for women located in agrarian reform settlements in the state of Rio. What are not always obvious, however, are the many key players that shape women’s participation in agrarian reform in the state. In order to get a clearer understanding of the increase in women’s participation in the settlements, I sought out the state and federal agrarian reform agencies, scholar-practitioners, and several research centers located throughout the city. I began learning about the complex relationship between all of these stakeholders, and while this took me in unexpected directions, I understood that this was necessary to get a better understanding of the local social and political context.
Beyond the qualitative data that I gathered, perhaps some of the most important insights took place during the times my positionality as a “researcher” was questioned by me or those I came across during my research. I found myself to be one of many foreign students in Brazil, one of many who went to study its agrarian reform advocacy organizations. Because I began the project as one that sought to study the correlation between increases in civic participation and human settlement patterns, I assumed that my previous work around equitable community development would suffice to create a space of comfort between those who participated in my research and myself. Researchers who preceded me have left marks and expectations, however, and questions frequently arose from experienced interviewees: What will be the impact of this research? What are your motivations for it? Will you ever come back? An honest uncertainty often pervaded my answers and I quickly realized that the subtexts of those questions were references to an unbalanced researcher-subject relationship, where the former takes and the latter gives. My being a student from the United States made this insight more striking: how I used my access to channels of knowledge production would help determine how I perceived and addressed this researcher-subject relationship.
Indeed, there were many lessons learned from my experiences over the summer, which means that the finality given to this project will be more for the sake of meeting project deadlines rather than an indicator of how it will continue to inform my intellectual and personal growth.
