Presentation and History

About the Program

The Graduate Program in Communication - Media and Narrative Formats (PPGCOM), Master's course, from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB), started its activities in 2017. It is the first Graduate Program in Communication located in a small town in the Northeast of Brazil, far from state capitals.

The studies resulting in the proposal formulation of the PPGCOM began in 2012. In dialogue with the items recommended in the Communication and Information area document by CAPES - Institution's Commitment, Facility Conditions, Course Proposal, Faculty, Faculty Productivity, and Research Capacity Consolidation - still in March 2012, a priority was established to articulately associate the research studies by professors from the courses at the Center for Arts, Humanities and Letters with focus on Communication.

In 2013, the "Thematic Seminar on Communication" was organized, and the professors within their respective research groups were able to dialogue and outline thematic similarities and specific problems on which they had been working. With the identification of these specificities, the research groups were reorganized and key concepts were highlighted - communication, art, media, memory and sensitivities -, which resulted in the boundaries of a large area of ​​concentration, that is, Media and Narrative Formats, and two research lines: Communication and Memory, and Media and Sensitivities, which were the guidelines of the PPGCOM project structuring.

Other actions also contributed to the course design as it currently works. Among them, the following stand out: the seminar held with the Office of the Dean of Research and Graduate Studies at UFRB, where the proposal profile and UFRB's commitment to stimulate and consolidate research in the institution were discussed; the seminar with the coordinators of PPG on Communication and related areas, where possible challenges, opportunities and partnerships were discussed; and the visits by professors César Guimarães (UFMG) and André Lemos (UFBA), with whom other aspects of the proposal were discussed.

Thus, PPGCOM is the result of the maturity of research produced by the faculty, which mostly involve social, identity, historical and affective dimensions, interpenetrated by the dynamics of Social Communication as well as by the interface with other areas of knowledge found in the CAHL, such as Social Sciences, Visual Arts, Museology, History, and Cinema and Audiovisual. In addition to the research, there is also the history of events held at the Center, such as film festivals - such as Cachoeira.Doc, one of the main documentary film festivals in Brazil - seminars on religious identities, debates on cultural manifestations and photographic exhibitions , which elucidate the social insertion of the Program's faculty with the local community.

PPGCOM has already hosted major international events, such as the IV International Congress on Culture, held in 2018 in a partnership with the Federal University of Bahia and the University of Minho, and other national events. In September, 2017, it promoted the Historicities in Communication Processes - VI Meeting of Brazilian Research Groups, with the theme Epistemic, Political and Cultural Movements of Time, which included the participation of researchers from UFBA, UFMG, UFRJ, UFRB, UFOP, UFPI, FIOCRUZ, UERJ and USP, in parallel with II RECOM – Communication and Social Processes, a regional event that became a space for reflection on contemporary themes from a communicational perspective. In 2019, the Program promoted COMÚSICA, where Brazilian researchers focused on debates related to music scenes, the music industry, its relationship with cities, creativity and criticism in academic research. In 2020, PPGCOM remotely held the third edition of RECOM, whose theme was Media and Narrative Formats.

In its four years of operation, PPGCOM has made a double effort to broadly dialogue with the Communication area, and historically with the specific regional reality of Bahia countryside, which has provided the strengthening of its identity specificity. This is reflected in the search for the course by students from the state of Bahia, primarily interested in exploring research themes aimed at the study of counter-hegemonic expressions of memory and sensitivities.

Master's Program

Main goal

To form new researchers in the field of Communication in order to consolidate the existing research networks at the Center for Arts, Humanities and Languages, providing the expansion of knowledge production on Social Communication in the regional, national and international scope.

Specific goals

 a) building knowledge aimed at communicational and cultural demands related to the specificities of the regional population and regional societal organizations’ lifestyle, notably in the Recôncavo da Bahia;

b) associating the study of communication, art and memory with social, cultural and/or aesthetic inequalities in order to provide comparative analysis and exchanges between Bahia and other regions of Brazil and the world;

c) articulately identifying problems in the communication field with multiple dimensions of social, political, economic, technological and cultural life in their mediatic, narrative and mnemonic meanings;

d) investigating the transformations generated in memory, sensitivities and narratives, considering the interfaces between different media, the current scenario of communication technologies, big data and consumption;

e) encouraging the convergence of themes that dialogue with the area of ​​communication, media and memory.