Journal of Latin American Communication Research

Navigating Cultural Landscapes through ALAIC´s Summer School Communication Research

Eliseo R Colón Zayas — 2023-12-21

In the diverse tapestry of academic inquiry, a symphony of nine voices resonates from ALAIC's 2023 Summer School held in Medellín, Colombia, each offering a unique perspective on the intricate relationships between culture, communication, and society. This edition of the Journal of Latin American Communication Research (JLACR) embarks on a journey through the realms of identity, discourse, embodiment, resistance, security, technology, and power, guided by the insights of nine distinct scholars. Their collective work spans various corners of the globe, from the lush landscapes of Amazonian folk festivals to the vibrant streets of Salvadoran youth, exploring the multifaceted intersections of culture and communication.

Authors

Miguel A Torres — 2023-12-21

Authors

Marketing Communication at the "Bambuco Festival in San Juan and San Pedro"

Ana Paula Almeida Miranda — 2023-12-21

This study investigates commercial advantages in organizations that adapt their identity to local culture in folk festivals in Amazonian countries, focusing on the Festival del Bambuco en San Juan y San Pedro, Colombia. Based on the theories of Martín-Barbero (1997), García Canclini (1995) and Lindstrom (2016), it examines the assimilation of cultural symbols in the event. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of consumption based on cultural heritages. It is a case study with product analysis and interviews, applying emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2019) to understand consumers. Supported by Luiz Beltrão (2014), as cited in Gushiken (2011), José Marques de Melo (2008), and others, linked to the theory of Folk Communication.

Communication Processes in the Communication Office Government Speech Formats: A Discursive Analysis of the News Published on the Rn Government Portal

Daiana de Medeiros Brandão — 2023-12-21

The article presents an approach to the discourse produced by government communication offices, based on the communication developed in the news published in the institutional media of government agencies, as a public power. It highlights the relevant need to do Public Communication, respecting equal rights, through equity applied between political and governmental communication, in defense of public interests in the production of news content. In this context, it makes an clipping from Brandão's dissertation (2023). It fosters a discussion that supports the practical development of communication based on democratic principles and the exercise of citizenship, through the institutional information built. This research work aims to contribute theoretically and empirically, with Latin American research in the field of media communication, which defend the applicability of Public Communication. In addition, the study aims to expand this discussion on the international scene, to promote theoretical-empirical knowledge of the theoretical perspectives of PC and French Discourse Analysis (DA), which are the main study methods used in the research. It is intended to encourage future publications by researchers who are interested in the theme of construction public discourse. The results show the predominant types of communication in the 14 news analyzed, verifying the democratic contributions of the Communication Office of the Government of Rio Grande do Norte, however it is verified that the communication exercised, presents in the production of meanings of the narratives, more discursive elements of a political-governmental communication.

The Body Represented

Diana Bernal Acevedo — 2023-12-21

This research proposes the body as a privileged stage for creating possible worlds and the school as a metaphor for its territory. The guiding question is: How do students represent their bodies and the relationships that stem from them? In this way, the study explores the body in the classroom as a site of interaction with the lifeworld, aiming to uncover the invisible learning experiences of students as objects of communication research.

The work attempts to understand the body as indivisible between its parts and the environment, as a contemporary axis of the notion of humanity, rooted in the core of social and human sciences. The body is seen as substance and action, the metaphor of all metaphors, cutting across various fields of knowledge.

Currently, the body seems to be reduced to social capital, an object open to commodification. It's a body dedicated to consumption, improvement, fitness, shaving, and stretching, while time contracts it—an advertising subject, a form of advertisement in itself.

The study seeks answers regarding young people's conceptions and interactions with their bodies by understanding the questions that arise from and about the body and the variations and processes of self-awareness that many young people undergo. This research is pursued through fieldwork on two continents, aiming to understand how these relationships can vary according to the cultural context.

Based on this background, a questionnaire is constructed. Its primary purpose is to comprehend how students perceive their relationships with their bodies, associating them with feelings, shapes, emotions, beauty, words, and other elements. Additionally, the study attempts to grasp the order in which the body is conceived: as a whole, composed of parts, or as parts? The questionnaire proposes the idea of the multidimensionality of the body, suggesting that the body is more than just its physical form—it traverses, travels, and transforms across different dimensions.

The questionnaire was administered to university students majoring in communication-related fields. A group of 200 students participated, with 100 from Universidad Sergio Arboleda in Bogotá, Colombia, and 100 from Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain. These universities were chosen to diversify the study's participants, encompassing private and public education, ensuring a broader spectrum of responses.

Studying the body as an object leads to cognition, communication, and information insights. Within its totality and in each of its parts, there is a complex web of cognitive processes intertwined with practices of self-organization, self-affirmation, reproduction, and complexity.

I have argued that cognitive science is beginning to realize that perception is not about recovering a pre-established world, but rather it is perceptually guided action in a world inseparable from our sensorimotor abilities, and that higher cognitive structures also arise from recurrent patterns of perceptually guided action. Therefore, cognition is not about representations but embodied action. (Varela, 1996, p. 9)

This exercise encourages students to reflect on bodily experiences, exploring their imaginations and ways of representing the body using focus group methodology. It aims to consider experiences in the educational setting as performances and recognize their potential to transform students' communication skills.

A look through her photographs: The case of Vanessa, a young Afro-Mexican woman

Gabriela Zaragoza Díaz — 2023-12-21

The article presents some results of the Master's thesis "Young Afro-Mexicans in the Face of racialization: photography on Instagram as a form of resistance." On this occasion, we delve into the experience of Vanessa, a young Afro-Mexican woman who uses the social network Instagram to show her position on her experiences in the face of racialization. The photographs created by Vanessa included a virtual ethnography exercise, which was selected and analyzed based on Corona Berkin's model (2011), with the denotative, connotative, and dialogic levels. These integrated the research categories formulated under self-representation and resistance against racialization. The work was complemented with the development of in-depth interviews. The results emphasize the connotative and dialogic levels, through which Vanessa's position is evident to re-signify her corporality and establish a position against the stereotype of the sexualized black woman. This reflects the construction of a discourse of self-representation reflected in her photographs, where this practice becomes a means to make various forms of resistance to racialization visible.

Digital Security in Youth: The Salvadoran Case

Karla Patricia Ramos Amaya — 2023-12-21

This manuscript provides a detailed account of the original findings from a research project on digital security in Salvadoran youth conducted in 2021 and published in 2022. This work falls within the action framework of the Media and Information Literacy Program "Alfabeta Media Lab," involving two Salvadoran universities. The research aims to understand the digital security practices and tools used by Salvadoran youth aged 16 to 24, identifying shortcomings that can inform future support and solutions. The methodology adopts a quantitative-qualitative approach, employing a questionnaire with a representative sample of 976 young individuals from both rural and urban areas across 13 of the 14 departments of the country, along with three focus groups consisting of 28 participants in total. The study's results underscore the importance of fostering digital security competencies within Media and Information Literacy to enhance critical thinking and responsible, active citizenship, promoting an ethical and contextually relevant approach to media products. Within this framework, digital security transcends mere technological instrumentality and becomes a practice with social consciousness.

Robots in Brazilian Journalistic Organizations: Two Case Studies

Laura Rayssa de Andrade Cabral — 2023-12-21

Several journalistic organizations in Brazil use robots on social media or messaging applications. Fátima, for example, is a robot who works on WhatsApp and belongs to the Aos Fatos agency. Elas no Congresso is a robot that operates on Twitter and belongs to Revista AzMina, an independent journalism magazine focused on gender. Therefore, this article has the general objective of carrying out a preliminary study on the use of robots in journalism, focusing on Fátima and Elas no Congresso, which are two robots that belong to Brazilian journalistic organizations. And as specific objectives: a) Describe the robots’ profiles; b) Highlight the types of content published on the profiles and c) Understand whether or not journalists are visible in the content. As a method to achieve the objectives of this article, we chose the case study (Yin, 2001; Gil, 2008). As main results, we found reflections on how, throughout history, journalistic organizations began to use robots in their processes and practices.

Children and adolescents facing adultcentrism. Radio narratives as an exercise of power in Bucaramanga, Colombia

Mayra Alejandra Durán Prada — 2023-12-21

This research is a longitudinal comparative study where through the exercise of radio production in two periods (2018-2019 and 2022) with children and adolescents in Bucaramanga, Colombia, an exercise of power in the face of adultcentrism mediated by narratives in which the participants find their own voice and a collective voice is evidenced. Through the content analysis of the scripts produced, participant observation and transcripts of the workshops, it is evident how they represent the adult and how, from their stories, they internalize adultcentrism or resist it.

Regimes of visibility and algorithmic surveillance on digital platforms: operationalizing the thought through images in a collaborative perspective

Raquel Assunção Oliveira — 2023-12-21

In this article, I present and analyze the results obtained in the first interview for the ongoing thesis project, which investigates how visibility regimes interfere with the algorithmic surveillance regime of bodies in contemporary times. In an initiative stimulated by the exchanges carried out in the Thematic Group Digital and Popular Communication, promoted by the IX ALAIC Summer School, I propose to connect in a single interview the two methodological fronts addressed: the construction of a collaborative visual atlas in the theoretical wake of archeology of visual knowledge, inspired by Aby Warburg, and conducting semi-structured interviews with collective leaders who question aspects of the capitalist culture of surveillance. To this end, the interviewee was presented with a set of images of artistic works related to the themes of body visibility and algorithmic surveillance. The data obtained brought up three thematic nodes: 1) Historical struggles, 2) Countercolonial cosmovisions, and 3) Thinking of images in opposition, which will be analyzed in resonance with the reflections of the authors Antônio Bispo dos Santos, Tarcízio Silva, and Kate Crawford.

LGBT+ digital activism. Notes for a communication conceptualization

Raul Anthony Olmedo Neri — 2023-12-21

Incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet into the structures and repertoires of contemporary social movements has developed concepts that aim to account for this techno-communicative assemblage. However, most of these proposals stem from an approach that reduces the use of ICT and the Internet to an instrumental dimension, thus minimizing the reconfigurations they entail when practicing and investigating current forms of activism. Therefore, this article seeks to develop a coherent concept of digital activism from a communicational perspective to identify its characteristics and the analytical implications that arise from the subject-technology-communication relationship. To accomplish this task, the analysis of the Mexican LGBT+ movement provides for this task because its experience empirically demonstrates the diversity of uses and meanings that ICT and the Internet can acquire for a contemporary social movement. This work concludes that digital activism promotes asynchronous, deterritorialized, disembodied, and reticular forms of action by the individuals who comprise a social movement; analytically, digital activism is not limited to the political arena but centers its impact on the symbolic dispute present in everyday life. Finally, from the communicational perspective, digital activism invites us to make visible the uses and meanings of those actors who, through the Internet, recalibrate their position in the hybrid public space and redefine their profiles to embody new forms of struggle.