CECS Researcher was Keynote Speaker at International Congress

Inês Amaral, a researcher from the CECS, where she is part of the Media and Journalism Group, and is a teacher at Instituto Superior Miguel Torga (Coimbra, Portugal), participated on October 26 as Keynote Speaker at the II International Congress “Active Aging, Quality of LIfe and”, at Carlos University III, in Madrid (Spain). She spoke on the theme “New (old) narratives in digital age: social representations of ageism from a gender perspective”.

According to Inês Amaral, the contemporaneity is witnessing a multiplicity of discourses on ageism broadcasted by the media and disseminated by digital media that create and recreate social and group identities due to the exploitation of stereotypes. So that, “Social representations of gender determine ‘who does what’ on the basis of ‘how women are’ and ‘how men are’. These representations are normative and impose themselves in the definition of different skills and roles between women and men”. Observing the importance of the digital world in the interaction and construction of social identities, “it is considered highly relevant to understand how old age is represented in digital narratives, and whether this medium can, by its disaggregated distribution of contents, be a tool for rebuilding meanings and conveying less conventional representations of old age, ageing and ageism”.

Complete programme, here