Abstract

The no tav question has become a criminal question: 500 activists suspected or accused and around a hundred trials does not any longer support the understanding - as does the positive jurist - that only individual episodes of crime are pursued. This paper analyzes the process of criminalization first, through the analysis of journalistic discourse in order to seize the gradual construction of the social problem. Second, we consider how the discourse may become a practice modifying the above, so that the voice may be returned to activists. Through fieldwork where the "labeled" may or may not contradict their stigmatization. We recognize only a limited gain for control devices, believing that the subject has not a passive role but instead, can withstand discursive practices by becoming active in the construction of meaning of those core issues that construct the concepts of knowledge, progress and democracy.