10.2-PrInt – Project

The project “Communication Technologies, City, and Media Culture” composes the first topic of the Capes PRINT-UERJ Program, “Culture and Social Theory: Focusing on Law, Labor, and Subjectivity,” alongside programs in Social Services, Arts, Social Sciences, Law, Philosophy, Languages, and Sociology.

It was created from a long reflection on the interaction between the two lines of research of the program, “Communication and Culture Technologies” and “Media Culture, Imaginary, and the City.” Since the two key points of articulation of the faculties’ research resided in the ideas of urban space, imaginary, and material culture, the PPGCOM PRINT project constitutes a perfect combination, within its great varieties, of different research proposals.

Essential Aspects

The essential issue of the project is investigating media devices in the environment of communication technologies and the historical configuration of these discourses. It considers the plurality of communicational expressions and highlights the components and material effects of media devices with their impacts on social life.

Thus, projects will involve:

a) the study of the historical processes of media development in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, specifically focused on its impoverished and peripheral regions.

b) the study of the formation processes for the social imaginary and memory archives.

c) the study of discursive practices and contemporary communication devices, emphasizing the repertoires, narratives, hybridizations, interculturalities, and the production of new subjectivities and their consequences.

Social and Scientific Relevance

In terms of social relevance, the project includes research aimed at studying forms of communication and sociability in Rio de Janeiro, especially in marginalized areas and regions. It is not only a question of investigating the forms of socialization and communicability in action within the city but also of thinking about strategies and proposals capable of increasing the instruments of communication, socialization, and integration in Rio de Janeiro.

Its scientific relevance lies in the intended contribution to the epistemology of communication in the development of research and methodologies with special attention to the issue of the “materialities of communication” and studies of the imaginary.