Defense images: framing of police violence by radical alternative media
images of violence; police violence; framing; radical alternative media; digital networks
In this dissertation, we question, as a research problem, how alternative radical media construct media products from images of police violence. We seek to identify and understand the different ways in which social movements and activist and alternative media use blatant images of police violence in the composition of their materials. To this end, we start from the reconstitution of iconic parts of the visual history of Brazilian violence, demarcating the instrumentalization of images of conflicts by agents of dominant ideologies and the processes of unframing promoted as a response to violence (BUTLER, 2018). We continue the investigation seeking to understand how communication emerges as a self- defense tactic of peoples (DORLIN, 2020), placing these informational efforts
in the category of Radical Alternative Media (DOWNING, 2004) due to their contexts and purposes. We also try to understand how the dynamics between actors in digital networks feed commotion and revolt in them through images of police violence, even triggering protests in the streets, influencing political and legal actions, and guiding traditional press vehicles (MATTOS, 2017). We
analyze our corpus, composed of Brazilian radical alternative media projects made available online between 2020 and 2022, with the help of Content Analysis instruments (BARDIN, 2002) and the “critical reading of audiovisual narratives” developed by Becker (2012).