Poverty, language and media: The cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico

Dr. Diego Burgos traveled to the University of Bergen in Norway this May to participate in the research project “Poverty, language and media: The cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico” or “POLAME”.

The POLAME-Project brings together an international and multidisciplinary team of researchers to study the language used by the most important newspapers in these four countries to construct and convey the notions of poverty.

The project starts out from the premise that major, “agenda-setting media”, in this case the most important newspapers in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico affect public opinion about what poverty is, and how it is conveyed and fought against.

The four countries have large populations, widespread poverty, and prominent positions in the politics and economy of Latin America, a continent characterized by the most conspicuous social inequality we can observe in the world today. In addition, the four countries have influential newspapers that contribute significantly to shaping the political agenda.

Using modern linguistic technologies, the project has automatically compiled thousands of articles referring to poverty, published in the newspapers in this study (The Polame-Corpus). This corpus consists of many millions of words and it is being analyzed by the multidisciplinary project team in order to identify the notions of poverty that are expressed through language, directly or indirectly. The analyses consider historical, cultural, and institutional factors, relevant theories of poverty and of discourse, in addition to the social practices related to the phenomenon of poverty.

source: http://www.uib.no/en/project/polame