Isadora Dutra Badra Bellati (QMUL) - 2024-25 Students
ltx151@qmul.ac.uk

The field of senses and the senses over the field

Since colonial times, land expropriation and concentration in Brazil have been the most significant contributors to social inequality and epistemic coloniality. While some marginalized communities fight for the right to occupy territories and regulate them according to their own epistemologies, the agribusiness monoculture advances continuously in rural areas contributing to violence in the countryside and to the destruction of the environment. For the sake of competence, the Brazilian Supreme Court is responsible for several of the country most critical land dispute cases. When judges interpret legal conflicts around issues such as property rights, contractual relations, or possible uses of natural resources, they constantly imagine and represent the spaces reached by laws. In that sense, spaces are for legal decisions not as static/ontological realities but, instead, active, dynamic compositions between the Law, physical places, and social interactions, a set of economic and power relations – meaning, lawscapes. The imaginaries over spaces, however, are not randomly built in the process of individual dreaming, but are part of social discourses, social imaginaries which, therefore, can be traced through legal discourse analysis. Following this idea, this work seeks to delve into three main question: i) First, through a methodology of rhetorical analysis applied to old cases judged the Brazilian Supreme Court, investigate if, in complicity with the liberal tradition, this court follows the tendency to “de-spatialize law”. ii) Second, analyse what could be the effects of this supposedly neutral/apolitical imaginary over spaces for future land dispute cases resolutions? iii) Third, understand if a practice of critical map-making produced in the field with Landless Workers representatives could be possibly used as visual –and performative – advocacy resource to build new conceptions of space (meaning speculative narratives) – within this court.

Principal Supervisor: Professor Maksymilian Del Mar