Post-Graduate Seminar
Hunger and food sovereignty in Brazilian media: symbolic violence and the construction of invisibilities

Luciane Lucas

February 12th, 2009, 17:00, CES Seminar Room

Presentation
Hunger is one of the most frequent themes of the Brazilian media, especially since it has been included in the social policies of the Lula Government through the Zero Hunger Programme. Nevertheless, although highly broadcasted and published, the media’s spectacularization of hunger contributes to an ever larger ignorance in what regards to the socio-economic and historical factors that give rise to this social phenomenon. The mediazation of hunger in Brazil not only freezes the subjects into a situation of food vulnerability, always portraying them as dependent of humanitarian aid, but also covers up the silent and invisible correlations that intertwine hunger and food production in Brazil. Parting from the concept of monoculture of communication – based on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ sociology of absences – we seek to analyze the symbolic violence enclosed in the hegemonic media discourse. This means demonstrating how hunger has been invisibilized in its condition of collateral effect of the Brazil’s food production economic model. By analyzing published news in journals such as Veja and Isto É, in the course of 2008, we shall discuss the media framework of hunger and food sovereignty, as to render evident the symbolic legitimation that the larger media has offered towards the advance of export agrobusiness. As we shall see, this phenomenon of legitimation happens in three ways: 1) the discoursive emphasis on economic growth and, thus, in capitalist productivity (and time) parameters; 2) the naturalization of differences that were economically produced and the criminalization of resistance experiences and 3) the silence as what concerns alternatives of production and food consumption (local know-how).

Biographic note
Luciane Lucas dos Santos is a post-doctoral student at the Centre for Social Studies (CES), University of Coimbra, under orientation of Professor Boaventura de Sousa Santos. She concluded her doctorate degree in Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro inn 2004 and is presently professor and researcher at the Masters Programme in Communication and Consumer Practises at the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM) and assistant professor at Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ). Her research relates to the following themes: consumption and modes of production; discoursive practises and social representations in the media.