CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Bruna della Torre Digital Culture Industry and Right-Wing Radicalism in Bolsonaro’s Brazil
Inspired by the studies of the Frankfurt School and its contemporary successors, this postdoctoral research aims to study the recent right-wing radicalism in Brazil, mobilizing apocalypse as a boundary concept to understand this phenomenon. The line of investigation, I propose, is the self-destructive tendencies in the Brazilian social body concerning President Jair Bolsonaro’s politics. The preliminary concept will be to investigate the relations between digital culture industry and the far-right propaganda it conveys and, on the one hand, the rise of authoritarianism in the country. The methodology resorts to a multi-method approach of analysis: firstly, the political advertising content and techniques on social media will be investigated; subsequently, our focus will turn to the profile of the consumers of such advertising, composed of constituents who voted for and support Jair Bolsonaro.