New Year's Message and School Blitz: Discourse, Violence and Threat in Brazil’s School Without Party Program

Abstract The self-titled School Without Party movement, according to its official website, would be "a joint initiative of students and parents concerned about the [supposed] political-ideological degree of contamination of Brazilian schools at all levels: from primary to higher education." In order to investigate, through critical discourse analysis, the discursive construction of threat and violence around this movement, this article takes as analytical object two texts available on the Internet, one of the Program's organizational scope and other of online journalistic media. The first text is entitled New Year's Message, and the second one is a news article from the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper about surprise visits to schools in São Paulo. The purpose is to reflect on how the private censorship discourse of the School Without Party Program can be legitimized in specific genres (message and news) and inculcated in styles designed to construct identities and identifications of social groups.