Book talks
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is an 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 the APCA Trophy in recognition of his curatorial work.
Book summary:
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.
Flynn chronicles the everyday lives of families navigating an extraordinary political reality over a fifteen-year period. At the heart of Pathways to Utopia is the realization that activism is not a momentary act but an ongoing, relational practice—one where even the smallest community actions reverberate, reshaping the very structures through which people seek to change the world.
Evocatively written and balancing careful ethnography with key theoretical interventions, the book illuminates the dreams and sacrifices that characterize a life lived as struggle. Unfolding across multiple points of time, Pathways to Utopia tells a story of hope and resilience—one that promises a lasting influence on our twenty-first-century political imagination.