Lecture: Challenging Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and Democracy in Brazil February 13, 2006

?Challenging Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) and Democracy in Brazil? will be the title of the talk given by Miguel Carter, assistant professor at American University?s School of International Service, on Monday, Feb. 13 at 7 p.m. at the Carleton College Gould Library Athenaeum. The event is free and open to the public.

The Brazilian Landless Peasant Movement (Movimento dos Sem Terra or MST) is the largest peasant movement in the world, with its beginnings in 1979. MST was officially founded in 1984 and has used land invasions and judicial appropriations to produce 2,350 rural settlements, half of which are in Brazil. With an estimated 1.5 million landless members from 23 states, the MST has performed numerous actions of land reform in Brazil, a country plagued by unfair land distribution.

Carter teaches at American University?s School of International Service as part of the International Development Program. An expert in Latin American politics, he is particularly interested in community development, social movements, civil society, religion and politics, transitions to democracy, and electoral demography. Carter has served as a research fellow in politics at University of Oxford?s Centre for Brazilian Studies and has consulted for The World Bank. He has conducted four years of field research on social mobilizations for land reform in Brazil and Paraguay. He also has taken part in the Frigo Advocacy Team at the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, advocating for equal funding for the ?rights-based? approach to land reform in Brazil.

Carter has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University?s Institute for Latin American Studies. He has written extensively on Paraguayan politics and its transition to democracy, and is completing two books on Brazil?s movement of landless rural workers.

The Carleton Latin American studies department is sponsoring the event. For more information and disability accommodations, call (507) 646-4085.