"Our dead have a voice": communication and resistance against police killings in Brazil

Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s theories of language, hegemony and counter-hegemony; critical race theories; Erving Goffman’s frame analysis; and from extensive communication scholarship, this qualitative study examines resistance to state violence in Brazil through the use of media and language. It employs frame analysis and grounded theory to analyze public content produced by two grassroots groups from Sao Paulo. The study shows how two groups create media and develop alternative grammars to resist criminalization, dehumanization, and erasure, in order to challenge dominant notions of race, space, justice, violence, and citizenship. Constructing a form of radical media located within broader networks of activism, these groups challenge traditional understandings police brutality in the country. In reframing police killings from necessary tools of social order into genocidal attacks on communities of black and poor periféricos, activists and families place racial meanings and identity at the center of the problem, expose structural inequalities, connect broader social justice issues, and put forth an understanding of state violence as a historical and foundational issue of Brazil as a nation. Furthermore, they expose the far-reaching consequences of state-sponsored violence through a frame of disruption: the broken normalcy of life, mental illness, financial problems, family separation, and community fragmentation resulting from massacres and other cases of police killings. The texts examined in this thesis also suggest that the family members, primarily mothers, are not seeking to restore the relative normalcy that existed in their lives before violence struck them. Having gone through the experiences of violence, neglect, and impunity they conceive their work as one of changing the existing framework of social relations; altering society’s views on state violence, its contexts, mechanisms, and consequences; and contributing to create a deeper understanding of justice. Their media present a robust body of counter-knowledge and public memory of violence that preclude the cases to vanishing from the public realm and offer much needed alternative narratives that explain state violence from the ground; alternative narratives that overtime may help close the immense knowledge gap that exists among different segments of Brazilian society.