THE CONCEPT OF SCHOOL BULLYING: a sociological counterpoint to the hegemonic discourse
Bullying. Ideology. Genre. Speech. Critical constructionism.
The bullying phenomenon constitutes a form of interpersonal aggression that for some time has become well-known, debated and problematized by several scholars or the media, mainly due to the global explosion of school massacres, whose authorship, for the most part, is attributed to former students who were once victims of this form of intimidation. In an attempt to understand and point solutions to this question, several studies and academic research emerged primarily in the 1980s, trying to establish precise contours around the definition of this form of aggression. Most of these interpretations and studies are based on the interpretive paradigm proposed in the 1980s by the Swedish researcher Dan Olweus (1978), a world pioneer and main reference in studies on the subject of bullying. This dissertation deals with this traditional approach and discusses the need to break with this interpretive monopoly produced, thus allowing other scientific knowledge to enter into the discussion of this topic and to produce new ways of understanding about the subject. Thus, it is a general objective of this research to critically problematize the hegemonic discourse that celebrates the issue of bullying and that announces its "truths" as if they were the only ones possible and necessary to be accepted. In addition, it is the mission of this research to present a sociological counterpoint of interpretation that offers a new perspective of understanding the subject, now under the focus of specific themes, such as gender, discourse and ideology production in culture. To do so, this research methodologically refers to the critical constructionist theory and its set of postulates that point to the social construction of human reality from ideology and culture, so that this reality can be timely deconstructed by the same human action. Counting on interviews with victims of bullying and a comparative literature review between the ideas of authors coming from the traditional approach and from those who share critical constructional thinking, this dissertation aims to open space so that, in posterity, areas of scientific knowledge distinct from the paradigm Traditional interpretation of the phenomenon can be inserted in the debates and problematizations about the issue and, consequently, produce new looks that pluralize the understanding of this form of intimidation.