Analysing the Linguistic Construction of Poverty in Latin American Media

The Research Council of Norway’s Latin America Programme aims “to enhance knowledge about Latin America in Norway by supporting high-quality research”, through the funding of research on topics ranging from development and society to climate, energy and natural resources.

More information on the programme can be found here.

On 3^rd of April, the RCN announced the results of two calls for proposals. Out of more than fifty project applications only three were awarded funding. Among them is the UiB project “Poverty, Language and Media - The Cases of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico”.

From different disciplines, sharing a common interest

The project has been seven months in the making, and is the result of a partnership between linguist Ana Beatriz Chiquito at the Department of Foreign Languages and Alberto Cimadamore, who is the director of the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP). Together they have gathered an international and multidisciplinary team of researchers to study the linguistic representations of poverty in Mexican, Argentinian, Colombian and Brazilian media.

– Alberto has been working on poverty for many years, and I have directed a NOMA Project in Bolivia, where the topic of scarcity was everywhere. I found it in student essays, in their perception of their own situation as students and of their country. I wanted to do research about this phenomenon, and then we combined our backgrounds and came up with this project, says Chiquito.

– There was a strong desire for collaboration, to do state of the art research. As Ana Beatriz says, the proposal is a synthesis of our backgrounds, and the project is unique. We use linguistic approaches to examine the notion of poverty from critical perspectives, says Cimadamore.

Poverty is an enduring problem throughout Latin America. Chiquito and Cimadamore chose to focus on Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil because of their media structures and relative economic prominence in the region.

– The four countries have been carefully selected. They have large populations and have a prominent place in the politics and economy of Latin America, which is the most unequal continent in the world. In addition the four countries all have strong media which contribute to shaping public opinion, says Chiquito.

Analysing a large number of texts to uncover ideologically conditioned views on poverty

The project proposal is based on the understanding “that hegemonic views conveyed by mainstream or agenda setting media tend to naturalize poverty within the ‘common sense’ and, at the same time overlook causal interpretations or explanations of poverty production and reproduction”. In order to test this hypothesis the researchers will combine established theories of poverty with linguistic corpus analysis.

The point of departure of the research will be glossaries of a large number of terms used in reference to poverty in both scholarly research and lay discourse. These glossaries have been created by experts in poverty research and sponsored by CROP. When key words and concepts appear in a media text corpus, their meaning in context will be related to the definitions found in the glossaries.   

A linguistic corpus is composed of a number of texts, and can be used to quantify recurrent words or expressions, and to analyse their meaning in different contexts. In the case of “Poverty, Language and Media”, the project will compile a corpus of at least one million words from each of the four countries, providing a representative collection of data which can be used for analysis. The glossaries will be the focus of the corpus analyses, but the corpora themselves may also indicate recurrent words and expressions which are relevant.

– Using corpus linguistics will give the project an empirical basis, says Chiquito.

The linguistic analyses need to be coupled with systematic and detailed contextual knowledge, regarding historical, cultural and institutional factors in Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Brazil.

This is because the project seeks to uncover how language use reproduces ideologies and interests by imposing certain notions, conceptions and definitions of poverty. In order to arrive at such empirical findings, the language use must be considered in relation to past and current world views which have formed and continue to form the political landscape in the different countries.

As a case in point the verb combatir appears frequently with the noun pobreza, indicating that there is a commonly held view, namely the need to fight poverty. As the project description emphasizes, “this word combination alone needs a cross-disciplinary analysis in order to understand its true meaning”, by considering the different occurrences of such combinations in context.

Broad international and multidisciplinary collaboration

In order to ensure a rigorous approach to the analysis of linguistic phenomena in context, Chiquito and Cimadamore have established partnerships with prominent researchers in the four countries, representing linguistics, media studies, sociology, economics and political science.

– One of our Argentinian partners is among Latin America’s most prominent linguists, and in Colombia we’ll be working with one of the continent’s most important research groups in corpus linguistics, says Chiquito.

– We’ll also be working with the researcher behind the glossary which has been sponsored by CROP, and we have partnered up with economists, linguists, sociologists and political scientists who are among the leading experts on poverty, adds Cimadamore, who emphasizes that it is not only the researchers themselves but also their institutions which have committed to participating in the project.

The project has also built a strong national network, including the Norwegian School of Economics and the University of Nordland.  

– The analyses we plan to do would not be possible without the network we have built for many years, says Chiquito.

Currently “Poverty, Language and Media” is limited to four Latin American countries, but the ambition is to expand the research to other areas:

– This is a comparative research project, and we will use a building blocks approach to test the same hypothesis for each new case study. At a later stage we’ll add other regions, such as Africa, says Cimadamore.