In 2017, after careful review by the Collegiate of the program of the previous ten years regarding the performance of the lines of research, there was a reconfiguration of their themes of interest, which generated new names and composition of faculty members. Since 2018, we have the following Research Lines: Communication and Digital Culture; Cultures of Image and Sound; Mediatization and Media Industry. It is worth noting that this new configuration has maintained the demarcation of ongoing research within the program in a coherent and articulated manner, as observed by their respective descriptions.
Communication and Digital Culture
It encompasses studies on contemporary society as massively connected and based on data and digital environments. The diverse approaches within the line are concerned with interactions, technological processes and structures, institutions and social behaviors in the context of the accelerated digitalization and datafication of the contemporary world. It brings together software studies; game studies; digital governance and democracy; socio-communicative dynamics in social networks, sociability, self-monitoring, identity and subject formation; forms of distributed surveillance and the controversies around privacy; theoretical and methodological challenges of big data; Internet of Things and smart cities; data journalism.
Cultures of Image and Sound
It investigates communication phenomena related to the cultures of image and sound, their historical, political and aesthetic transformation processes. The reflection carried out in the line contemplates a plurality of approaches and considers the cultures of image and sound in their poetic, aesthetic, stylistic, narrative, plastic, historical, cultural and political aspects. The researches in this line encompass the development of theoretical frameworks and/or methodological procedures for the analysis of the audiovisual, image and sound.
Mediatization and Media Industry
It brings together studies about the processes of mediatization of culture and society and their relations with the media industries. The line includes studies on journalism, digital and audiovisual media; fictional and non-fictional creation processes; construction modes of media and journalistic formats; production and circulation of languages and meanings; innovations and practices of media industries and their creative and productive processes; discourses and syntactic arrangements of media products; methodological and epistemological issues of communication and mediatization.