Words encounter in Restorative Procedures - a possible view on language and its operation

• Grant number: 10/05136-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: May 01, 2010
• End date: January 31, 2011
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Philosophy of Language
• Principal Investigator: Valdemir Miotello
• Grantee: Ana Beatriz Ferreira Dias
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

With the intention of exploring new practices of justice emerging in Brazil, through the language research bias, this study aims to construct comprehension about language and its operation in four concrete, natural cases of restorative justice. What interests us is to analyze the encounter of words (that includes meanings negotiation, misunderstandings, polysemies etc.) which happens between activity coordinators, victims, offenders, and their respective support communities, during the moment of the justice procedure called Restorative Circle. We will seek to analyze how different voices mutually relate and respond to each other (harmonically or not), confronting different social positions towards certain goals. The Restorative Circles whose language we intend to analyze integrate the procedures of restorative justice, carried out at the 3rd Juvenile Court for Children and Youth of Porto Alegre (RS), by the technical team of the Court of Juvenile Justice, together with the Justice for the 21st Century Project, with the main objective of restoring social relations hampered by conflicts. To develop this study, we will take as our basis the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the philosophy of language, more specifically the orientations proposed by the Bakhtin Circle and more contemporary authors who depart from Bakhtinian studies to develop their reflections. From this, we will actively and responsively articulate a series of concepts, such as the reported speech, exotopy and utterance, to construct comprehensions of language facts. Focusing on the encounter of offender and victim under this point of view is to assume that verbal interaction is the space through which these subjects are constituted, at the same time they constitute themselves in it.