From the pandemic to the context of elections in Brazil. Higher Seminar with Viviane Borelli, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria

From the understanding that we live in a society in mediatization, it is intended to bring both theoretical and empirical questions to reflect on the emergence of circulation. Thus, based on the contributions of Eliseo Verón (1997, 2004, 2013) who defends that there are no linearity or causality in the world of the senses and that there are of distinct semiosis; by Antonio Fausto Neto (2016; 2018) who approaches the constitution of singular “contact zones” and by José Luiz Braga (2011a, 2011b, 2017) who conceives circulation as flows forward, I intend to bring some examples of how circulation challenges us to undertake more in-depth looks at the interactional dynamics.

We are faced with the age of uncertainty. Meanings formerly constructed by the media as a more linear and causal frame to their enunciation, increasingly take shape by enunciation processes with injunctions from different enunciators that are registered on multiple digital platforms (Van Dijck, Poell and De Waal, 2018; Van Dijck, 2021). To problematize these issues, I bring two examples that illustrate these complexities in the Brazilian context: the circulation of information about the pandemic in WhatsApp groups and the recent discussions on the proliferation of fake news on digital platforms that triggered, among other issues, legal actions in an attempt to regulate Telegram in an election year in Brazil.

Viviane Borelli is associate professor at the department of Communication Science at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, Brazil. She is currently part of the CAPES/STINT-project Mediatization: Empirical, epistemological and methodological inferences from media research in Brazil and Sweden in collaboration with the department of Media and Communication at Södertörn University.

It will be possible to participate in the seminar both live on campus or digitally via Zoom. For more information including Zoom link, please contact Saga Hansén (details below).