Critical Geography, Agrarian Conflicts, and Pedagogical Innovation: Milton Santos's Theoretical Legacy and the Territorial Dispute Between Agribusiness and Agroecology in Contemporary Brazil

This paper analyzes the theoretical legacy of Milton Santos (1926–2001), Brazil’s foremost critical geographer, as a framework for understanding contemporary territorial disputes in the Brazilian countryside. Drawing on his seminal work Por uma outra globalização (Towards a Different Globalisation, 2001), as well as his broader corpus, the study investigates how the conceptual dichotomy between the upper circuit (circuito superior) and the lower circuit (circuito inferior) of the economy illuminates the asymmetric conflict between the hegemonic expansion of agribusiness (agronegócio) and the grassroots resistance of agroecology across Brazil. The analysis demonstrates that Brazilian agribusiness operates as the dominant expression of the upper circuit in the countryside—a system of luminous spaces (espaços luminosos) governed by external capitalist rationalities, capital-intensive technology, land financialisation, and export-oriented logistics. This dynamic systematically alienates territories from local use and deepens socio-environmental inequalities. In contrast, agroecology and campo (rural field) education embody a lower circuit logic: horizontal, place-based, and oriented toward food sovereignty and the commons. These practices represent what Santos defined as a counter-logic to “globalisation as perversity” (globalização como perversidade). The methodology combines a systematic bibliographic review of Santos’s principal theoretical contributions with a practice-based pedagogical dimension: the production of an educational video at IFPE Campus Caruaru (Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Pernambuco) for the Desafio INVOZ 2026, a national initiative promoting public education, student protagonism, and pedagogical innovation within Brazilian federal institutes. This process demonstrated that audiovisual pedagogy is an effective tool for demystifying the dominant “fable” of agricultural modernisation and for connecting critical geographic theory to the lived territorial realities of students and communities in the semi-arid Agreste of Pernambuco. This work integrates academic rigour with student protagonism, strengthening the political formation of its author and contributing to the public debate on the democratisation of land access, the social function of property, and the sovereign use of Brazilian territory in the face of global extractive logics.