The risks of the semantic inflation of “bullying” in the media and in the field of education

Abstract

This paper analyzes critically the discursive practices produced by academic research, the written press and the educational community on the phenomenon of bullying. The empirical corpus is comprised of 3581 journalistic notes from 4 newspapers of the City of La Plata, 60 semi-structured interviews and 9 focus groups with students from secondary schools in the province ofBuenos Aires, Argentina. We defined bullying briefly as an object of study and an approach to analysis, identified how the written press uses the term in its media coverage, and studied the meanings that students construct on the phenomenon in question. From a socio-educational perspective, we identified on the one hand a discursive convergence that deploys an individualizing and stigmatizing view of violence in schools, and on the other hand we observed a semantic inflation of the term bullying to name different situations that exceed the phenomenon in question. We conclude that is necessary to be cautious in using this word, and that certain assumptions from this perspective may contribute to shape, performatively, what they postulate analytically.