MILObs seminar: Media literacy players in Brazil

André Santoro, professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University (São Paulo, Brazil) and visiting researcher at the Communication and Society Research Centre, will be the speaker at the next MILObs Seminar. On January 13, at 2.30 p.m., in the main room of the Social Sciences Institute of the University of Minho, the author will lead a session on “Media literacy actors in Brazil: a preliminary survey”.

According to the synopsis provided by André Santoro, “Brazil is today one of the countries most affected by the global wave of misinformation – intensified mainly by social networks and messaging apps. The recent national political scene has also played a prominent role in this phenomenon. Since the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, far-right sectors have used digital tools to disseminate fake news that helped consolidate a power project culminating with the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 and halted – but not fully stopped – by the 2022 elections. In this context, media education gains a strategic role, but its application is still quite timid”.

Thus, according to André Santoro, “this seminar aims to present a preliminary survey of the main players involved in media literacy in Brazil. The starting point for defining the players’ categories is the work Media Education in Portugal: experiences, actors and contexts (2011) by Manuel Pinto (coord.), Sara Pereira, Luís Pereira and Tiago Dias Ferreira. Without overlooking the Brazilian idiosyncrasies, which lead to the impossibility of using all the proposed categories, the classification is based on the following items: a) Associations; b) Libraries; c) Companies; d) Higher Education; e) Schools/Basic and Secondary Schools; f) Government; g) Public Institutions; h) Media; i) International Organizations; j) Providers; k) Others – as indicated on p. 77 of the work mentioned above”.

Admission is free.

[Posted: 05-01-2023]