Right to Speak. Social Inequality and Linguistic Inequality

DAGATTI, MARIANO

Hannover

Conferencia; Herrenhausen Conference "Re-thinking Social Inequality"; 2014

Fundación Volkswagen

This project aims to investigate the relationship between social inequality and symbolic capital in Latin America. To this end, we analyze the concern of Latin American governments (members of the so called "left turn") to establish reading as a social equality practice. True citizenship appears, in this perspective, as the result of the exercise of a critical reading of symbolic exchanges that regulate the public sphere. Two major areas of problem could be mention regarding this issue: literacy culture and mass media. These are two great areas seen as symbolic interface areas where citizens can create mechanisms for social equality in countries marked by structural inequality. It is known that language is involved in the production and reproduction of social inequality. That is why the right to speak is unevenly distributed and associated with social inequalities and differences. Regarding to this, my project aims to study three phenomena involved in the asymmetric movement of symbolic capital in contemporary Latin American societies: the phenomenon of reading as a practice of building citizenship, the phenomenon of "deconstruction" of the media discourse as a practice of symbolic criticism and the phenomenon of cosmopolitanism of  minor languages, by lifting the censorship of subaltern languages ,​​for symbolic defense of marginal cultural expressions and for teacher education in minority languages ​. The proposed work is thus addressing the problem of social inequality and the symbolic capital, that is, how language policies develop and promote equity? Preliminary results confirm that these policies generate childcare conditions for better distribution of symbolic goods, in social intangibles. Symbolic circuits affect the formation of new cultural hegemonies and the redistribution of public forces.