The Impact Project

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Abstract

This article discusses the parameter of social impact embedded in the UK’s research exercise with reference to the case study “Gender and Education in Rural Brazil,” and assesses the benefits of UK-produced landlessness-specific scholarship to the “Sem Terra” segment of Brazilian society. It reviews the first stage of the research,“Landless Voices I,” whilst looking into the parameter's expectation of long-term impact vis-à-vis markedly protean macro contexts. It then focuses on the project’s inevitable second stage, “Landless Voices II” (2014–18), a new research and major pedagogical intervention in countryside education within the Brazilian context of concomitant landmark structural developments (technology reaching the remote countryside) and legal and cultural changes (legalisation of same-sex relationships in 2013). “Landless Voices II” thus interconnects scholarship on the culture of landlessness and on gender-related intergenerational differences as well as the concept of interterritoriality, coined by Fernandes in 2009, for the analysis of profound generational tensions in the countryside in response to said changes and the potentialised projection of non-normative conjugalities by TV from 2013–2015. The researchers’ established scholarship on landless-specific ethos and modes of expression will be seen to have been particularly relevant to provide an echo chamber for the youth to voice out repressed responses to historical mutability, to root gender diversity in countryside schools’ syllabi, and to create counter-hegemonic expressions. The article concludes with a meditation on the paucity of methodological tools in the Humanities to render symbolic impact an empirically established fact, and thus measurable.