Call for Papers: Dossier Volume 50 Revista Significação

Special Dossier - Revista Significação Volume 50 

Scientists have known about the possibility of a global pandemic for many years. Regional outbreaks of respiratory viruses, caused by viruses originating from bats displaced from their natural habitat by processes of environmental change, have occurred in Asia and India in recent decades. Scientific knowledge was not, however, able to extrapolate the universities and penetrate the agenda of political institutions responsible for undertaking preventive actions.

Universities are directly involved in the ongoing economic, social, political, and cultural transformations in our world. Being at the forefront of technological transformations, universities are also a privileged locus of critical thinking, engendering innovative ideas towards new concepts and modes of living.

Cinema and the audiovisual media are relatively recent fields of knowledge, present in universities only from the second half of the 20th century onwards. What do 50 years mean within such millennial institutions? And what happens with the scholarship when the contours of the field are being undone and remade in the current digital revolution?

One of the first journals in the area, initially dedicated to semiotic research, and since 2007 with a reduced scope to audiovisual culture but expanded to incorporate plural expressions and approaches, Revista Significação celebrates its 50th volume with a dossier that aims to debate the potential of research in the area and to meet the challenges posed in this new millennium, saturated by the production and circulation of images and sounds.

New forms of production and circulation change conventional routines, formats, language, and criticism. The profusion of audiovisual objects present in streaming platforms and social media challenges the usual methods of research, criticism, or interpretation. Algorithms govern the production and access to digital content. What can film and audiovisual research do in these times of economic, political, technological, and cultural transition?

After an era guided by quantitative assessments of intellectual production, new horizons are opening up. What is the role of research in the areas of intersection between communication and the arts, especially focused on forms of expression in images and sounds?

Individual research, based on the interpretation of works and historiographical research in increasingly digitized collections, maintains its preponderance in the area. But collaborative research projects, with funding from agencies and with a transdisciplinary scope, are gaining ground.

How can academic journals contribute to stimulating theoretical and empirical research, authorial interpretations, criticism, and curatorship that problematize the possibility of contemporary experience around audiovisual media and forms?

We are open to empirical reports about recent interdisciplinary research projects which contemplate diverse areas and approaches within an ever-diversifying field, and which deal with the challenges posed and/or replaced. We intend to open space for a cartography of contemporary studies in the area, national and transnational contours, feminist, intersectional, based on critical theory, cultural studies, post-structuralist, historiographical approaches, the study of languages, in heterodox combinations, which contribute to boosting publications in a strategic, but still timid, area of ​​academic production.

Contributions are welcome through to the end of 2023.