Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira: “The university is present in the city and this is fundamental for this articulation between academia and society”

Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira is a professor at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) in Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil. She spent four months in the Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS) as a visiting researcher, a period that she characterized as “a rich experience” and “a complement of the academic course”.

For the researcher on Organizational Communication, the CECS has raised “a very important question: an extension of the research concept”. Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira says she is impressed with “this relationship between the university and the city, with society”. “The university is present in the city and this is fundamental for this articulation between academia and society”, reinforces the teacher from Minas Gerais. For the researcher, the experience at CECS resulted in an incentive: “At least in my head, I have two projects, thinking about this devolution to society, listening to people, bringing people into the university. Here, we have this”.

During her stay, Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira was a speaker at the Meeting of Organizational and Strategic Communication Researchers and the Doctoral Conference on Organizational Communication.

In a comparison between the Brazilian reality and the Portuguese reality, Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira believes that “in Brazil, the university is very separated from the big cities”. She further argues that “here, there is a theoretical connection and a search for grounding in English authors. In Brazil, we are much more connected to the French and Latin Americans”, therefore, “it is different the focus of the processes that are developed”. “Now is the time for us to make this articulation between what is produced in Brazil and what Portugal produces. I think it will be a very interesting dialogue, because it is a dialogue of theoretical perspectives that complement each other”, adds the teacher.

Currently, Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira teaches the subject “Media Interactions”, in the Master of Social Communication of PUC. She has a postdoctoral degree from the Université of Toulouse (2013) and a doctorate in Communication and Culture from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2002).

[Posted: 16-07-2019]