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LATIN-AM-Latin-Amerika-programmet

Poverty, Language and Media - The Cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

Alternative title: null

Awarded: NOK 3.7 mill.

The research project "Poverty, language and media in Latin America. The cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico" (POLAME) was funded by the Research Council of Norway. The project was a collaboration between the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, Norway and several universities in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The project brought together an international and multidisciplinary team of researchers to identify how agenda-setting media in these four countries construct notions of poverty and how they use language to convey them. Agenda-setting media are influential in defining the issues that are perceived as most urgent in society; who is responsible for solving them, and which solutions are considered appropriate. A large database (a corpus) of about 50 million words was built based on articles related to poverty, published by major newspapers in the four countries, between 2000 and 2014. This corpus enabled POLAME researchers to use a variety of methods ranging from critical discourse analysis to linguistic statistical analysis in their research. In the first book from the project "Pobreza, Lenguaje y Medios. Los casos de Argentina, Brasil, Colombia y México" (2017, Peter Lang) (Poverty, Language and Media: The Cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico) the authors studied whether poverty was depicted as a natural phenomenon, indicating that political ambitions to ?solving the poverty problems? would be futile. Alternatively, poverty might be described as a socially constructed problem that might be identified and solved given an adequate understanding, followed up by adequate programs and sufficient resources. The findings demonstrated firstly, that the way in which poverty is depicted varies, from cases where it was seen as an irreparable natural state to case were it was considered a humanly created social problem caused be specific structural conditions. A number of social, political and ideological conditions likely affected these perspectives, and we studied additional linguistic material in order to demonstrate how these conditions were reflected in different media and in the phases of the political development of a nation. One important finding is the observation that the way in which newspapers convey poverty issues was affected by language of leading international organizations such as UNDP and ECLAC (CEPAL). Because of this influence, the media language tended to become standardized and technical. This was evident when we studied the frequent use of abbreviations. At the same time we could observe how the language differed from newspaper to newspaper, also reflecting to some extent their ideological profiles and the peculiarities of the social and political situation in each country. We developed an analysis of all data from the four countries where we systematically were able to account for how language usage varies depending on national context, the political leaning of the newspaper and the influence of international organizations. POLAME developed electronic tools (robots) for the collection of large quantities of data from newspaper websites. These tools were also used to extend the analyses to include social media. This enabled us to analyze and compare the way in which poverty was handled linguistically and understood by social media users and users of traditional media. We developed accordingly a research design for the collection and analysis of Twitter data, which in this case required tools for collecting and analyzing large quantities of data (BigData analytics). Surprisingly, social media users followed the lead of international organizations and discussed poverty informally, but using the same categories proposed by international organizations (e.i regarding measurements and the economic definition of poverty). The major findings of the POLAME-project are published or in the process of being published in the following anthologies of articles by project researchers. (1) Chiquito, A.B.; Quiroz, G. (eds.) (2017) Pobreza, Lenguaje y Medios. Los Casos de Argentina, Brasil, Colombia y México (Peter Lang). (2) Alvarez, S. and N. Naharro (eds.) (forthcoming March 2018) Aspectos Sociales de la Pobreza en America Latina (Social Aspects of Poverty in Latin America) CLACSO. (3) Llull, G.; Pinardi, C.; G. Quiroz (eds.) (forthcoming April 2018) El Lenguaje de la Pobreza. Comunicación Multifacética (The Language of Poverty. Multifaceted Communication) CLACSO. (4) Book (forthcoming June 2018, CLACSO) with working title La Pobreza en la Prensa: Palabras clave en los diarios de Argentina, Brasil, Colombia y México. (Poverty in the Press: key words in the daily newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico). This fourth book is intended for researchers, journalists, students and persons interested in the study of poverty.

The project is a comparative case study of how agenda setting media in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico convey and construct the notions of poverty. The project will study ideologies and interests expressed in the notions/conceptions/definitions of poverty transmitted by agenda setting media in order to understand the theoretical and practical (i.e., policies) implications of the linguistic framing of poverty. The project aims to: 1) Identify the linguistic expressions representing poverty in agenda -setting media in Argentinean, Colombian and Mexican Spanish and in Brazilian Portuguese. 2) Identify which notion or notions of poverty are conveyed through linguistic expressions in these countries. 3) Study whether explicit or implicit interests and id eologies can be identified when notions of poverty are conveyed. 4) Analyze the implications of the study for policy makers and other professionals and organizations working with poverty. 5) Build a web-searchable taxonomy of the language of poverty which could also be used for further research, applications and publications. The taxonomy and the project data base will have open access. 6) Publish a collection of articles based on the results of the project in Spanish and English. The proposed research in tends to go well beyond the state of the art in Latin America by contextualizing the use of notions of poverty or social representations using multidisciplinary analysis and relate these notions to relevant contemporary theories of poverty as well as to t he discourse and practice of poverty eradication. Quantitative and qualitative research methods will be instrumental to hypothesis testing and theory development. Resulting knowledge will have implications for policy and social change allowing the identif ication of factors impeding the social understanding of poverty and therefore, the effective design, implementation, and long-term political support of anti-poverty policies.

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LATIN-AM-Latin-Amerika-programmet