Direitos humanos como um medium de comunicação: uma análise do emprego da expressão “direitos humanos” nos jornais O Estado de S. Paulo e Folha de S. Paulo (2017-2018)

Abstract

Human rights play a central role in contemporary struggles, being mobilized by various actors and social systems and incorporating a set of demands and meanings. In the last decade, some studies have proposed a new way of observing these rights in society. In the field of the sociology of human rights, human rights are investigated as a scientific object, to understand what their empirical uses in the contemporary world are. The goal of this research is to understand how human rights are empirically mobilized, in the form of discourses, in the newspapers O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de S. Paulo, during 2017 and 2018. The empirical corpus is formed by 352 newspaper articles, 132 from O Estado de S. Paulo and 220 from Folha de S. Paulo. This research mobilizes the theoretical notion of medium (LUHMANN, 2005), through the medium/form distinction to understand the meanings attributed to human rights in the discourses that circulate in the news media. As a methodological approach, I observed human rights in concrete communications – journalistic articles – through the discourse category. I use the approach of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to map the chains of signification (meanings) that are articulated in the discourses of construction and deconstruction of human rights in newspapers.