About – English
13 de September de 2023 2023-11-15 10:56About – English
ABOUT
The Graduate Program in Communication and Contemporary Culture at the Federal University of Bahia - Póscom/UFBA
The Graduate Program in Communication and Contemporary Culture at the Federal University of Bahia – Póscom/UFBA celebrated thirty years of existence in 2020. The master’s course was approved by Capes in 1989. The first class started in 1990, under the coordination of Marcos Palacios (from May 1990 to September 1993). The PhD course started its first class in 1995, under the coordination of Wilson Gomes (from October 1993 to September 97).
Since 1993, when the master’s course received the first Capes evaluation grade (before that, Capes had the reference SC [Sem Conceito], meaning “No Grade”, for new courses), the program has remained stably located at the level of excellence. We have had grade A since the first evaluation and when this grade was changed to the numerical scale, we were never attributed a grade below 5 (in a scale whose maximum grade is currently 7).
It is worth remembering that only in the triennial evaluation Capes, referring to the period from 2007 to 2009, the grade 6 started to be attributed to a course of the Communication area.
In 2022, Póscom reached grade 6 in the quadrennial evaluation for the period from 2017 to 2020. The concept consolidates the recognition of the program’s excellence, both for its academic quality (evidenced by the intellectual, technical and artistic production of teachers, students, and graduates of the program), and for its social impact in national and international contexts (evidenced by that production and by the dialogue networks in which teachers, students, and graduates actively participate).
Thus, Póscom is currently the only graduate program in the area of Communication in the Northeast region of Brazil that has been recognized with a grade of 6 by Capes.
The master’s and doctoral levels of Póscom are structured in the same area of concentration – Contemporary Communication and Culture – and in three research lines: Communication and Digital Culture, Cultures of Image and Sound and Mediatization and Media Industries.
In this context, the principles that have guided the academic activities and the training of researchers emphasize the activities of the Research Groups, which provide a productive work environment that broadens the capacity to gather and articulate professors and students, in terms of theoretical and methodological affinities.
The apparent addition of “communication and culture” is seen by the researchers not as a mere juxtaposition of two fields of problems (to which, by the way, we would add the adjective “contemporary”).
On the contrary, it is treated as a unit, where the nexus is given by the understanding that, in contemporaneity, a new set of cultural trends is in force, and that these trends can be understood in a fruitful way only by taking into account their essential link with the new forms, languages and processes of communication.
Thus, the object of studies that the Program understands as being proper is not the amalgam of “culture and communication”, whose cut would be given only by the restriction “contemporary”, but the cultures of communication in contemporaneity, that is, contemporary cultures as they can be explained by the comprehensive presence of the media.
Within this general perspective, at least four horizons of problems are contemplated:
the problem of contemporary sociability and its essential link, in a multidirectional transit, to media cultures;
the problem of the new forms of perception and of production and circulation of meaning, requested and configured in media cultures by the ambience of digital technologies;
the issues concerning the difficulties, possibilities and needs of demarcation of these new cultural trends;
the possible models and categories of analysis that must be used to understand contemporary media cultures, posing the epistemological problem of the research methodologies capable of dealing with the phenomena and languages of contemporary communication.
ADMINISTRATION
The administration of the Program is the responsibility of a full Collegiate, composed of all its permanent faculty members and by student representatives from each level (master’s and doctorate). With the full Collegiate, we have achieved greater articulation and active participation of the faculty in the consultative and decision-making processes that govern the life of our scientific community.
