title: Protest literacies
title: texts and practices contesting military policing and mega-events in Rio de
      Janeiro
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Duncan, James
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2019
Subjects: Literacy
Literacies
Protest
Social Movements
Brazil
Favelas

description: During the mid to late 2000s, a period of contentious politics emerged in
      the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) concerning social movement responses
      to so-called ‘mega-events’ due to be hosted there – e.g. the 2014 FIFA
      World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. Central to contentions were newly
      implemented policing and housing policies associated with preparations for
      these mega-events: firstly installation of policing in favelas and
      secondly an extensive programme of evictions and displacements referred to
      in short as ‘pacification’ and ‘removals’ respectively. In my thesis, I
      chart the development of local social movements’ responses to these
      mega-events, focussing especially on one area of favelas named Maré in the
      North Zone periphery of Rio. I describe these developing contestations
      over a period of ten years from around 2006-2016 which I frame in terms of
      an extended episode or cycle of contention and protesting about a specific
      set of themes – most prominent to which is a series of deaths of favela
      residents killed during military police operations in favelas. Based on
      one year of fieldwork in Rio over 2013-2014 and archival research
      thereafter, the empirical focus of the study is on protest events (e.g.
      demonstrations and protest marches), the themes that were contested
      through these, how such events connected over time, and the social uses of
      literacy and related communication technologies in their mobilization,
      performance, and dissemination.
      
      Firstly, from a synchronic perspective, the findings show five sets of
      literacy practices which were central to protest events and social
      movement activities: campaigning literacies, memorial literacies,
      media-activist literacies, arts-activist literacies, and demonstration
      literacies. Seen as interconnecting and taken together, these were the
      principle literacies of social protest, or protest literacies. Secondly,
      from a diachronic perspective, I highlight multiple examples of meaning
      making trajectories that interlinked ongoing protest events from
      2006-2016. The two main examples were realised through flows of
      recontextualized and resemiotized texts and practices, referred to as
      symbolization trajectories and memorialization trajectories. Lastly, I
      show how traditional protesting texts and practices locally were becoming
      reshaped by the uptake of new communications technologies (websites,
      blogs, SNS, etc.), which had started to become used by social movements
      during the period in discussion (from around 2006 onward). In this
      changing social-political setting and changing
      communications-technological environment, new roles and usages for texts
      emerged. These allowed for the amplification of local voices on national
      and global scales – especially so, over 2013-2014, the year of my
      fieldwork and also the period of the largest and most sustained protesting
      in Rio and Brazil for thirty years.
      
      Theoretically, my thesis draws on and contributes toward ethnographic and
      historical traditions in the New Literacy Studies, whilst combining this
      research lens with work from Discourse Studies, Social Movement Studies,
      and Cultural Anthropology, amongst others. Data and findings contribute to
      both local and global academic and activist work on the issues addressed,
      from the impacts of global mega-events upon local communities, to the
      increasing militarization of public spaces and social life, as well as
      social movements’ contestations of these and other issues, through
      traditional and changing means of protest.