Name: ISABELLY LOPES MEDEIROS DE PAULA
Publication date: 28/08/2026
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| BRUNO GADELHA XAVIER | Examinador Externo |
| EMERSON CAMPOS GONCALVES | Presidente |
| RAFAEL BELLAN RODRIGUES DE SOUZA | Examinador Interno |
Summary: This research critically examines the discourses embedded in Brazilian True Crime podcasts (2020–2024), with the aim of critically analyzing the construction of a classbased and segregationist narrative grounded in the assumptions of the Ideology of Social Defense (Baratta, 2002). The dissertation is based on the hypothesis that the contemporary dynamics of the Culture Industry (Adorno & Horkheimer, 1985) have appropriated this communicative medium as a commodity, thereby reaffirming punitive axioms identified by critical criminological perspectives such as the Labelling Approach and Critical Criminology (Baratta, 2002). Within this context, the study aims to understand how this form of communication contributes to the constitution of an audience within the Excited Society (Türcke, 2010), situated in a complex hyper-punitivist environment that reinforces the assumptions of the criminal justice system as an instrument of class domination. To examine these issues, the research adopts Critical Theoretical Hermeneutic Analysis as the methodological approach most appropriate to the proposed investigation. Among the main findings, the study shows that true crime podcasts reinforce patterns of penal selectivity by transforming real suffering into a commodity without critically examining the social structures that produce it. It concludes that this genre should be understood in its inherent contradiction: neither merely as a form of political denunciation nor simply as an exploitation of violence, but as a mode of narrating violence shaped by the dynamics of platform capitalism.
