The functioning of trolling in Brazilian politics: a discursive analysis

• Grant number: 24/05495-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: October 01, 2024
• End date: September 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Félix Piovezani Filho
• Grantee: Myllena Araújo do Nascimento
• Supervisor: Julien Longhi
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: CY Cergy Paris Université, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/03218-9 - Trolling in Brazilian politics: a discursive analysis of humor effects in far right discourse, BP.DR

Abstract

The project aims to improve and consolidate our analysis of the functioning of trolling in Brazilian political discourse, with the aim of better developing our doctoral proposal in Brazil: to discursively analyze the functioning of trolling present in political memes and public demonstrations, focusing particularly on its uses on the extreme right, during and after the 2018 and 2022 presidential campaigns, in order to identify, describe, categorize and interpret the main properties of trolling, the production of its effects, the materialization of its affects and the possible discursive mutations it promotes in ways of saying hate speech in the political field. This in-depth study will be carried out above all through the articulation between the foundations and notions of Discourse Analysis with which we work and the assumptions and procedures derived from discursive semantics and linguistic pragmatics devoted to the analysis of hate speech, as they are employed by our supervisor. The conjunction between our field of work and knowledge from these other areas of linguistics is fundamental for us to understand how trolling works in Brazilian political discourse and how statements about it are formulated in our material. More precisely, this association will help us to deduce these aspects: to investigate the discursive practice of political trolling; to identify and analyze what is most often said about the trolled groups and social subjects in the statements that troll them and how these statements are formulated and also to deduce and examine the main affects materialized in the political trolling of extreme right-wing profiles and communities.