Vale orphans: a study on trauma, grief and space based on testimonies from victims of the Brumadinho disaster-crime

• Grant number: 24/10883-1
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: April 01, 2025
• End date: February 28, 2026
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Lauro José Siqueira Baldini
• Grantee: Amani Musstafa Zoghbi
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This research is affiliated with materialist discourse analysis (Orlandi, 2007, 2009; Pêcheux, [1981] 2011), and aims to mobilize testimony literature (Mariani, 2016; Levi, [1946] 2013; Seligmann-Silva , 2017) and psychoanalytic foundations about grief (Allouch, [1995] 2004; Freud, [1915] 2010) to investigate, substantiate and articulate, theoretically and analytically, in testimonial discourse, versions of grief based on its relationship with a loss of a space. The research proposes a close look at the functioning and marks of linguistic-discursive materiality in the testimonial discourse, questioning to what extent they reveal themselves to be regular and point to attempts at understanding, elaborating and symbolizing trauma, grief and space. The investigation, which shifts its focus to linguistic materiality, orality, and what emerges through non-sense, failure, initially uses as a guiding thread forty testimonies from victims of the crime disaster in Brumadinho-MG, a city crossed and buried by mud and toxic waste under the omission of the mining company Vale S.A.. Each testimony is transcribed in accordance with Petri's transcription conventions (1993, 2009). The process of analyzing the corpus will be carried out through a reading-crunching gesture (Pêcheux, 1981), producing extractions, clippings and approximations of discursive sequences, statements and linguistic marks that bring us closer to what we suspect to be structuring. The delimitation of the corpus does not aim for horizontal exhaustiveness (in extension), but vertical exhaustiveness (Orlandi, 2009), which produces relevant theoretical consequences. This work aims to contribute substantially to a theoretical and analytical deepening of the inscription of trauma in linguistic materiality, and the space factor in individual and collective mourning processes. Our academic agenda also aims to contribute to the development of political and social intervention agendas that can result in policies for reparation, reception and support for victims.