科研成果详情

On 24th March 2020, in a televised interview, Brazilian President Jaír Bolsonaro notoriously dismissed the symptoms of the COVID-19 virus as a 'gripezinha', which can be translated into English as a 'mild dose of the flu.' While his characterization of the illness was consistent with the Brazilian leader's other pronouncements about the virus and with his claims that he and his compatriots would be relatively immune to its impact, it was this expression, repeated endlessly, that came to symbolize the laissez-faire attitude of the leadership to the crisis. By November 2020, COVID-19 had resulted in over 150,000 deaths in the country, and Brazil was third only to the USA and India in virus-related fatalities. The pandemic also arrived in Brazil at a time of defunding of public universities generally, and governmental hostility towards the humanities and social sciences in particular. This chapter considers ways in which the humanities and social sciences in Brazil might respond to the constraints imposed by the pandemic by drawing on the tradition of critical discourse analysis and the more recent innovations of the digital and medical humanities. The chapter also considers the likely impact of the economic and health crisis on Brazilian public universities’ plans for internationalization.