João Massarolo
Filmmaker, PhD in Cinema from the University of São Paulo, Associate Professor at UFSCar; CNPq/Brazil Productivity Fellow, Coordinator of GEMInIS; Editor of GEMInIS magazine. Director and screenwriter of several films: São Carlos / 68 and O Quintal dos Guerrilheiros (2005). Published: Hashtags in transmedia curatorships for film festivals and the MixBrasil experience, 2022 (Fisher, A.; Massarolo, J. C); Aruanas: innovation and creativity in times of Covid-19 pandemic. (Org.) 2021; multiplatform character creation and development, 2020 (Nesteriuk, S.; Massarolo, J. C.), among others.
Email: massarolo@terra.com.br
CHALLENGES OF TRANSMEDIA LITERACY in the context of platforming society
The educational environment in the context of platforming society has been characterized by the systemic use of digital infrastructures provided by the five major platform companies in the United States: Google (Alphabet), Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. According to Poell, Nieborg, and Van Dijck (2020, p.5), this process implies the “penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life”. In the educational system, teaching and learning platforms could formally contribute to the teaching and learning process, or in a non-formal manner, by the daily practice of producing content. In this context, transmedia practices created in the content industries’ domain enable the development of skills, so young people can deal with technological advances—as is the case of the literacy experience “Educomunicação Mais 10” (UFMT) and the project “Inventar com a Diferença” (UFF).
María Amor Pérez Rodríguez
Tenured Professor at the University of Huelva. Member of the Ágora Research Group, the ALFAMED Network and the Comunicar group. Associate editor of the academic journal “Comunicar”, and Advisory Board of the journal “Heliyon”. Researcher in national and international R+D+i Projects, her research and publications focus on the development of media competency, media literacy, new narratives in the digital context and their curricular integration.
Email: amor@uhu.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8312-5412
Media competency for citizenship in the digital context. Research on Instagrammers and YouTubers
In modern society, the relevance and influence of communicative practices in social networks led us to analyze the modes of communication, innovation, dissemination, and participation of Youtubers and Instagrammers in order to determine the educommunicative priorities for the implementation of training initiatives and strategies. Given the impact of these platforms on plural and diverse contexts and everyday context, YouTube and Instagram are studied in terms of uses and access, in different citizenship domains such as education, families, content creators and social collectives, and/or at risk of social exclusion, The research concluded that media literacy is essential for the development of media competency required in the digital environment, as a fundamental human factor for the construction of critical and equitably participatory citizenship.
Marco Solaroli
Associate Professor of Cultural Sociology and Communication in the Department of the Arts at the University of Bologna. He studied at the University of Bologna, the University of Milan, and the University of Pennsylvania, and he has been Fulbright Research Scholar at New York University. His research interests reside at the intersection of cultural sociology, cultural studies, and visual culture studies. Most recently, he co-edited the special issue of the Italian journal of cultural studies «Studi Culturali» (1/2022) entitled «Cultural Studies Today: Identities, Intersections, Challenges», and he co-organized the international conference «What’s Happening to Cultural Studies?» (University of Brighton, 2022).
Cultural studies and visual citizenship
This speech aims at addressing the historical relevance and contemporary value of cultural studies for the analysis of visual culture. It argues that a pioneering visual sensibility was at the core of the cultural studies project since its very beginning. Such an intellectual trajectory has been only marginally recognized within the increasingly institutionalized academic field of visual culture studies. However, cultural studies can offer fertile insights to developed critical interpretations of issues of visual identity, politics, and power in the contemporary conjuncture. On this basis, this speech will elaborate on recent symbolic struggles around media representation and public (in)visibility, by focusing on three case studies involving key figures from Italian politics, photography, and popular music.
Ana Cristina Mendes
Ana Cristina Mendes is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. Her areas of specialization are cultural studies, postcolonial studies, adaptation studies, and visual culture, with an emphasis on the post-colonial dimensions of Victorianism and Neo-Victorianism. She is the President of the Association for Cultural Studies – ACS (2022-2026).
DECOLONISING IN THE SEMI-PERIPHERY: THE CASE OF ENGLISH STUDIES
Decolonising curricula in European universities, higher education institutions built on assumptions of epistemic universalism, is a multifaceted and challenging task. The project-practice of epistemic decolonization is especially complex in the classroom. It requires a critical, self-reflexive examination of the knowledge we produce and teach, the conditions under which we access knowledge, and how we share it with others. Building on research published in the book Decolonising English Studies from the Semi-periphery (Palgrave, 2023), this presentation begins by reflecting on our place of theoretical enunciation in light of the decolonial theoretical contributions of Walter Mignolo and Ramón Grosfoguel. This will be followed by a succinct survey of the historical and political origins of the idea of decolonizing the university until its most visible manifestation in the Rhodes Must Fall protest movement at the University of Cape Town in South Africa in 2015, and the ramifications of this movement in various Anglophone universities. On the assumption that specific geopolitical contexts must be considered in responding to global calls to decolonize the university, this presentation will highlight the unique critical perspective that comes from researching and teaching English Studies in Portugal, a southern European country occupying a semi-peripheral position in the world-system.
Ignacio Aguaded
Tenured Professor of the Department of Education at the University of Huelva (Spain). President of the ‘Comunicar’ Group, a pioneer group in Educommunication in Spain. Editor-in-Chief of the renowned scientific journal ‘Comunicar’ (indexed in JCR-Q1, Scopus-Q1, top 1% worldwide…). Dr. Ignacio Aguaded is a Principal Investigator (PI) of the ‘Ágora’ Research Group, with multiple national and international research projects. He has directed hundreds of research works and 45 doctoral theses. He is the Director of the International Interuniversity Master in Communication and Audiovisual Education (UNIA/UHU) and Coordinator of the Interuniversity Doctoral Programme in Communication (US, UMA, UCA and UHU). Founding President of the Euro-American Network of Researchers ‘Alfamed’, composed of 19 countries. Best Researcher Award at the University of Huelva 2015 and Ibero-American Communication Award (ASICOM). He has been the Vice-Rector of Technologies, Innovation and Quality at the University of Huelva for more than 7 years. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0229-1118.
Email: aguaded@uhu.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0229-1118
THE WORLD’S LEADING ACADEMIC JOURNALS IN CULTURAL STUDIES: COMUNICAR AS A MODEL
Research excellence in the area of Cultural Studies is directly linked to publication in quality journals in this area in the most important databases worldwide: Web of Science and Scopus. The latter indexing has a specific field of Cultural Studies confirmed by 1,200 journals from all over the world, on a wide variety of subjects. Identifying and consulting them is a basic task for any researcher in the field, not only to read in them, but also to review and apply to publish.
Moisés de Lemos Martins
Moisés de Lemos Martins was a Tenured Professor at the University of Minho for decades, where he directed the Research Center for Communication and Society – which he founded in 2001. At the same university, he was also the founder and former editor of the journals Comunicação e Sociedade, Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies, and Vista.
Currently, Lectures at the Lusófona University, at Porto University Center, where he is the Director of the Faculty of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies.
Moisés Martins holds a Ph.D. from the University of Strasbourg in Social Sciences (Sociology). He has published in the field of Sociology of Culture, Social Semiotics, Sociology of Communication, Visual Semiotics, Intercultural Communication, Scientific Policies, and Lusophone Studies. Moisés directed the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Minho for ten years. He was the president of Sopcom – Portuguese Association of Communication Sciences, from 2005 to 2015; Lusocom – Federation of Lusophone Associations of Communication Sciences, from 2011 to 2015; and Confibercom – Ibero-American Confederation of Scientific and Academic Communication Associations, from 2012 to 2015.
Email: moiseslmartins@gmail.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4550-0562
Scientific Policy and Languages of Science
My proposal questions scientific policy and its intersection with Lusophony, that is, with a dream of academic cooperation supported by the Portuguese language. Such a dream includes a community of cultures, thought, and knowledge. Moreover, what I specifically propose to discuss here is the Portuguese language as a language of science. The exercise I undertake covers the last 15 years of scientific policy in Portugal, a period that traverses several constitutional governments, some center-right, others center-left. I do so based on case studies, which on the one hand, scrutinize evaluations made by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) to research centers in Social Sciences and Humanities, and on the other hand, analyze the recurring FCT calls for “research projects in all scientific areas.
Maria Manuel Baptista
Tenured Professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures of the University of Aveiro, with Aggregation in Cultural Studies from the University of Minho (2013). In the last five years, she has devoted her work to the internationalization of Cultural Studies from Portugal, founding, in 2020, the International Network in Cultural Studies (RIEC) and the National Network in Cultural Studies (RNEC), of which she is President and represents the University of Aveiro as founding institution. She is the President of IRENNE – Association for Research, Prevention and Combating Violence and Exclusion. She coordinates the Center for Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (CLLC) at the University of Aveiro. Maria Manuel Baptista has been focusing – with special emphasis and productivity – on issues that, at the core of Cultural Studies, trigger theoretical fields such as Gender Studies, Decolonial Studies, Postcolonialism, and Tourism.
Cultural Studies in Portugal: crossroads and labyrinths
In this paper, I will trace the ‘pre-history’ of Cultural Studies in Portugal and, from the 2000s onwards, discuss the differences between Culture, Cultural Sciences, Studies of Culture, and Cultural Studies. In particular, I will focus on how Portuguese higher education has made theoretical, epistemological, and methodological choices around this field of knowledge, starting in the twenty-first century, and discussing the ‘labyrinths’ it has gone through and the crossroads it currently faces.
