Aporofobia : a pobreza nos espaços midiáticos

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the manifestations of the term “aporophobia” – fear and aversion to the poor – in the Brazilian media during the first 100 days of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva’s government (Workers’ Party – PT), which began on January 1, 2023. The research focused on Brazilian news websites, divided into two stages: the first focused on the use of the term itself, and the second on articles where aporophobia was effectively depicted, though not always explicitly mentioned. The timeframe of the collection coincided with the government transition in the country, from Jair Bolsonaro (Liberal Party - PL) to Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (PT), who included fighting hunger and social inequality in his government platform. The expression “aporophobia” was coined in the late 1990s by Professor Adela Cortina, but it gained media prominence in 2017 when it was considered the word of the year by the Urgent Spanish Foundation. In this work, the use of the term was monitored using the Google News search tool, filtering for the word “aporophobia” and collecting articles where the term appears. The gathered material was curated to remove repetitions and errors made by the tool during the search, resulting in the corpus for the first stage of the research. For the second stage, aimed at identifying articles that reveal aporophobia through characterization of the phenomenon without using the word, data was collected from Instagram profiles related to Father Júlio Lancellotti and the Dom Pedro Casaldáliga Observatory of Aporophobia, the main channels for discussing and combating the issue in Brazil. The collected material was cataloged based on use and application perspectives and subsequently analyzed using content analysis methodology, following Laurence Bardin's framework, to identify the categories of meaning revealed by word usage in the texts. The identified categories/significations were: (1) structural aporophobia; (2) hostile architecture/cleansing; (3) public policies; (4) semantics; and (5) violence. These terms were supported by inferences made from texts by theorists such as Adela Cortina, Stig Hjarvard, Eliseo Verón, Stuart Hall, Anselm Strauss, Jessé Souza, and Isabel Wilkerson, among others. As a final result, it was possible to identify and interpret the trajectory of the term “aporophobia” in the media environment and understand how this dynamic affects people's relationships with the less fortunate in a reality of extreme inequalities, extending to issues involving homeless people, hostile public architectures, public space cleansing policies, and crimes. It was also possible to identify that the very construction of the term is changing, and in some spaces, aporophobia has already been Brazilianized and is referred to as “pobrefobia.”