Meanings of poverty in Brazilian politics and media: a discursive analysis of the production and reception of sayings and silences about the poor in Brazil

• Grant number: 12/16355-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: November 01, 2012
• End date: March 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Félix Piovezani Filho
• Grantee: Carlos Alberto Turati
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 13/10266-8 - Meanings of poverty in Brazilian politics and media: a discursive analysis of the production and reception of sayings and silences about the poor in Brazil, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

The current president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, since her election campaign in 2010, has taken poverty as a topic of speech, recently had created the "Plan Brazil without misery" and pointed prospects for overcoming all the measures already undertaken in Brazilian history to solve the problem of social inequality. Even, the president has presented in their pronouncements the statement "A wealthy country is a country without poverty" as the motto of her government. We realize that along the political practices, much has been said about poverty and different meanings are produced. In face of this, we propose in this project to investigate the various senses about poverty in contemporary Brazilian society. To this end, through the identification of discourses that determine what is said and what is silenced about poverty, we intend to analyze the production process of meanings in advertisements and pronouncements by Dilma Rousseff's government, which are presented with the slogan signature "A wealthy country is a country without poverty". In addition, we intend to analyze also the meaning of poverty in the news that report the Presidency's pronouncements, considering the relationship between media and political discourse for construction of specific meanings as well as the ideological position of news media regarding the presidential speech. To develop this study, we based our work on the theoretical framework of Discourse Analysis, mainly on studies directly affiliated with Michel Pêcheux; and we have too as base the work of Bakhtin/Volochínov about the relationship of reported speech, specifically to observe this issue.