Research

LabCom.IFP is composed by three research groups: 

1. Communication and Media
2. Practical Philosophy
3. Arts and Humanities

and its interdisciplinary work is carried out under three lines of research which are: 

• Information, Media and Society; 
• Ethics and Politics, and Culture;
• New Humanities.

The line Information, Media and Society focus on issues arising from the interface between media and information society, particularly on Political Communication, Strategic Communication, Journalism and Media Studies. The research undertaken by this group faces the mediated and communicative dimensions of participation deliberation, participation and representativeness, the media influence in the configuration of the public sphere as well as the separation between the public and the private domains. 

The line Ethics and Politics is centered in ethical/political issues developed and applied to the theory and practices of democracy, through the role of the media and / or the “aestheticization” of politics. 

The line Culture and New Humanities considers the man as a cultural actor, a creator, analyzing the way in which he is and is projected in space and time. This line focus on the modes, media and means of expression and the establishment of the “self-image”, with particular attention to artistic events, film, visual arts, performing arts, literature and multimedia design. This line promotes fundamental and applied research in three complementary areas: a) Memory and Identity, inquiring dynamics between content, media and technologies; b) Representation as a process considering relations between the aesthetic spheres and the political modernity; c) Intersections between Culture, Information and Design interfaces, integrating methodologies of art and science to better understand the phenomena of significance, the distribution of the sensible and the creation of new knowledge and secularization.

Within these three dimensions - communicative, ethical, political and artistic - there are crossing issues of a new epistemological domain generally called New Humanities that confront themselves with particular problems: interaction between the organic and the inorganic, changes of the traditional boundaries between the public and the private, mutations on speeches narratives and representations, newer forms of knowledge transmission and socialization processes, and striking metamorphoses in sharing cultural memory.