O discurso contemporâneo de negação da ciência sob a ótica da Linguística Aplicada em periódicos científicos brasileiros

Abstract

Applied Linguistics (AL) is approaching its 80th anniversary. During adult life, it brought attention to questions that traditional language studies had always left aside. Throughout the pandemic caused by the new Coronavirus (2020-2022), it was no different: its journals included provocations about emergency issues of managing the health crisis and its consequences in citizens' lives, such as confronting science denial speeches. That's what we're discussing here in this article. The main goal of the research is to map and categorize in 3 journals (Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada, Trabalhos de Linguística Aplicada and Calidoscópio) the discursive positions adopted in scientific articles about scientific denialism during the pandemic period. Following a methodological design of qualitative research, we adopted the “word cloud” format to highlight the most cited keywords in articles published in the respective journals and, then, we carry out a dialogical-discursive comparison with AL assumptions. The analyzes show that denialism was on the agenda of the journals for those 3 years, with more emphasis in the years 2020 and 2021 and combines the denialist speeches in the period with the positions of the authority speeches (Bakhtin, 2015) of the former president Jair Bolsonaro.