Symbolic violence: discursive representation of extreme poverty in Brazil – relationships between homelessness and neighborhoods

Abstract

This paper is an expansion of the paper presented at the "1st International Symposium EDiSo 2014" in 2014. The paper presented at the symposium consisted of a detailed critical discourse analysis (van Dijk, 2001; Fairclough, 2003; van Leeuwen, 2008; Ramalho and Resende, 2011) of a text published in 2013 in the site of Folha de S. Paulo, a Brazilian traditional newspaper. This is a new text that criticizes the installation of a social center in a middle class neighborhood. For this article, I expanded the discussion, bringing other texts that also establish relation between 'homelessness' and 'neighborhood'. In so doing, my goal is to encourage further discussion of symbolic violence beside the violation of rights of people facing homelessness, even though this broadening of scope implies necessarily less analytical detail. The texts referred to here are a condominium circular (Resende, 2009), news published in a newspaper of free distribution (Resende, 2012) and news published in online journalism (Resende, in press). Reflecting on them in an integrated way, we can see common threads in the representation of homelessness, especially its connection to discourses of risk and nuisance and its representation by the focus of other populations. Supported by MCTI/CNPq 14/2013, 470300/2013-2.