Knowledge in motion: reflections on the organization and representation in the archives of the landless rural workers movement

Abstract

Social movements produce documents with the aim of organizing struggles, maintaining political and social training, and recording and preserving the memory of activism. This article reflects on the process of producing, organizing, and representing knowledge in social movement archives, with a focus on the Landless Rural Workers' Movement. It is a bibliographical study, in which materials on Social Movement Archives, Knowledge Organization, Social Movements, Landless Movement, Social Movement Archives and Landless Rural Workers' Movement Archives are retrieved and analyzed in national and international databases, magazines, journals, congresses, scientific events, manuals and dictionaries specialized in the theme proposed for this investigation. Although they do not follow the logic of administrative, business, and governmental document production, it can be inferred that social movements follow their own guidelines for developing specific instruments and methods for organizing and representing their archives. With regard to the process of organizing and representing knowledge in the archives of the Landless Movement, based on the literature review, it was possible to see that documentary production is extensive, as various documentary manifestations are produced such as letters, correspondence, photographs, pamphlets, posters, cartoons, applications, documents that represent the struggles of the activists and that can be analyzed in the light of Archival Science and the Organization and Representation of Knowledge, which in turn can also be analyzed based on archival principles, such as provenance and natural accumulation. About the production of knowledge in social movements, it can be partially seen, drawing on Jean Piaget's theory, that it is exogenous knowledge, i.e., produced from the outside in, so that from a socio-interactionist relationship between the Movement's settlers and settlers, this knowledge is organized and represented by their own means and this action is related to certain praxis. As a continuation of this discussion, given the Movement's interest in making its archives available to academic researchers, other social movements, and society in general, we are interested in discussing the possibility of carrying out interviews with the settlers in order to collect more consistent data and with the process of associating it with a process of preserving the memory of the militants, which most of the time, due to the bureaucratic process, ends up not being taken into account by some social movements. In this way, the next step also aims to propose a debate on the mapping the Movement's collections in Agrarian Reform settlements located in the state of São Paulo, as well as analyzing the main documentary manifestations produced over almost 40 years of resistance and struggle in defense of the rights of landless rural workers.