Presentation | Basis | Objectives

Basis

In modern societies, the search for certainty as an answer to insecurity produced by war, vulnerability to forces of nature, implied the creation of social institutes, such as science, politics, democracy and working society, among others as emancipation projects to "foresee" the future, to assure the symbolic integration of society and understand the fears of a meaningless life. The purpose is to find new ways of human imagination and intervention that respond to violence, superstitions and nature, so that men and women not only can become their own "masters" of society, but also to choose, by their own criteria, different horizons of possibility: to be, to do, to feel and to think.

However, nor the techno-scientific civilization, nor the industrial society, nor the modern state-nation have prepared the human being sufficiently to live in a creative and productive manner alongside uncertainty, just as they haven't been able to keep under control the threat of facing a meaningless life. On the contrary, they have generated new scenarios, agents and representations (local and global) saturated of fears, risks and insecurities that tend to escape from traditional institutes who are the controllers and protectors of society.

We live in times of instability which motivate students of communication to stop and consider the following aspects:

•  [FIELD OF FORMATION] The challenges that this environment of uncertainty establish to the academy-university in the formation of social communicators, in a time characterized by the globalization of fears and the labor flexibility that by the same reason requires to imagine "new" horizons of interpretation and action to identify the demands of occupational certainty and the social role of communication.

•  [COMMUNICATION MEDIA] The place occupied by media and their agendas of information and fiction in these processes of uncertainty: agents, networks, formats and speeches. We speak of the capacity that media industries have not only for making visible and invisible the demands of security and order, but also to carry out the uncertainty and reproduce experiences of subjectivity and feelings of community which generate imaginary bonds between people and society including domestic and public domains.

•  [INVESTIGATION AGENDAS] The own agendas and itineraries of investigation that this context of uncertainty makes a field, like the one of communication, which is not free from the demands of certainty, having also at stake dynamics concerning public opinion, social links and production of sense.

•  [POLITICS OF SENSE] The roll that in this context of uncertainty is not only played by agents of power and the "politics of fear" with their global rhetoric on security, the exclusion and suspicion, but also of social and cultural movements, the political actors and the diverse groups of society in their struggles to build a worthwhile future for mankind and to respond in a democratic and creative way to the demands of certainty.