About

Professor Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor and Graduate Vice Chair of the Culture and Performance Doctoral Program in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

His research brings the arts and the social sciences into dialogue, combining critical theory with sustained engagement in aesthetic practice. Working with activists, curators, and artists, Alex investigates how art in community contexts can generate new forms of knowledge, propose alternatives to the utopian, and open up critical perspectives on temporality. Framed by a collaborative methodological approach, his work asks how human beings express themselves artistically, and in doing so, seek to transform the world. His most recent book, Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (Indiana University Press, 2025), explores the temporalities of social transformation through fifteen years of ethnographic engagement with the MST.

Having worked in Brazil since 2007 with the MST and more recently in Mexico, Argentina, and Thailand, Alex’s work increasingly focuses on the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of inquiry. This has resulted in exhibitions such as Concrete Mirror in Paris, with Noara Quintana, Cartoneras: Releituras Latino-americanas in São Paulo, with Beatriz Lemos, and most recently at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, where he co-curated Construction, Occupation with Juliana Caffé and Yudi Rafael in 2025. From 2016 to 2017, he was co-curator of the Residência Artística Cambridge, an artistic residency programme based within an occupied building in downtown São Paulo. For this project, he received the prestigious São Paulo Association of Art Critics 2017 APCA Trophy.

Alex’s scholarship has been recognized by substantial funding awards from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council. At UCLA he is a member of the Center for Brazilian Studies and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. He is also an affiliated member of the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique at Paris’ École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

Expertise and Teaching

Contemporary art, curatorial practice, and interdisciplinary methodologies; ethnography, activism, and social movements; temporality, utopias, and alternative modernisms; anthropological theory, sociality, and transformation; pluriversal and anticolonial approaches, with a geographic focus on Brazil and Thailand.

Recent courses include: Curating Cultures, Research Methodologies, Introduction to Field-Based Research Methods, and Whose Monument, Where?

Recent publications

Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (Indiana University Press, 2025)

Forty Years of the Landless Workers Movement: Landless Perspectives (Routledge, 2024)

Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2022), Winner of the 2023 LASA Best Book in Visual Culture Studies award

Published open access in Spanish as Creando Mundos: Las Editoriales Cartoneras en América Latina (Editorial Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica, 2023)

Relational Art. In: The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, in 12 Vols. Edited by Hilary Callan. New York: Wiley Blackwell

On Anthropology, on Curation. In ‘The Anthropologist as Curator’. Sansi, R. (ed.). London: Bloomsbury

Once upon a time in Utopia: Bergson, temporality and the remaking of social movement futures. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale. Special issue ‘Utopian Confluences. Anthropological mappings of generative politics’ 29(1): 156-173.

Doctoral Supervision

Alex welcomes inquiries relating to the Culture and Performance PhD Program on topics connected with but not limited to socially engaged artistic practice, ethnographic research methodologies, expanded curatorial practice, social movement activisms, and diasporic aesthetics.

Current supervisions

Kristen Dorsey, Department of Gender Studies, UCLA

Cora Laszlo, WACD, UCLA

Gabriel Silva Collins, Department of Archaeology, UCLA

Ravindu Ranawaka, WACD, UCLA

Marina D'Aiuto, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Politique, EHESS

Completed supervisions

Lili Flores, WACD, UCLA - 2024

Rodolfo Ward, Departamento de Artes Visuais, Universidade de Brasília - 2023