Rita Basílio Simões

University of Coimbra | UC · Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information

There is nothing new about how the news ecosystem has undergone significant changes in recent years, especially with the rise of digital media and the consequent growth of news apps and social media platforms. News apps often prioritise popular and viral content, which may lead to a focus on sensationalism and entertainment-based approaches rather...

Mainstream newsroom routines have faced significant shifts in the last decades. Regardless of its nature, these changes can be seen from a gender perspective and framed within neoliberalism, seen as a structural force affecting people's lives and an ideology of governance that shapes subjectivities. In this paper, we aim to discuss how neoliberalis...

Awareness of how journalists report critical events is crucial to acknowledge the media's social consequences. Especially during emergent public health threats such as the covid-19 pandemic, whose impacts extend to professionals' private lives. Yet, little is known about how journalists' identities and personal traits influence their reports. This...

Analisamos neste artigo, a partir de uma perspetiva feminista interseccional, a cobertura mediática de dois deputados únicos representantes de partidos estreantes no Parlamento português, em 2019: André Ventura e Joacine Katar Moreira. Por meio de uma Análise de Conteúdo qualitativamente orientada, examinamos a produção informativa de três diários...

O pânico moral, a descrença nas vacinas e o medo das reações adversas deram o tom à campanha de imuniza-ção contra o HPV no Brasil, que teve início em 2014 e que privilegiou as meninas na toma da vacina. Neste trabalho, investigamos os padrões discursivos na cobertura noticiosa durante os cinco anos de campanha de vacinação (2014-2018). A partir de...

Better theories and practices are constructed through a deep understanding of the subjects involved. In Portugal, young adults aged 18 to 30 are a group sometimes left out because the Portuguese official statistical data does not treat this as an age category by itself, dividing it either into young people or the general idea of adults. Through a s...

This research focuses on social media mobile applications as mediated interfaces of identity performances and interrogates to what extent everyday young adults’ uses are remaking gender scripts. We analyze young adults’ self-reported experiences on preferred social media apps and discourses of rejection of others, the technologies themselves, and h...

RESUMO O pós-feminismo é uma formação discursiva neoliberal que tem caracterizado os produtos culturais contemporâneos e propagado um modo altamente conservador de empoderamento que enfraquece as causas feministas. A investigação tem mostrado que o pós-feminismo obscurece as causas estruturais da desigualdade de gênero e o modo como elas se sobrepõ...

Media representations have always been seen as a site of power struggles. Often, media imbalances embody layers of meaning embedded in an ethnocentric notion of history of societies and depicting non-Western as subaltern identities. This research paper starts from a feminist constructionist and intersectional perspective to understand the values, b...

A large body of research has documented gender bias in the news coverage of women. Despite small gains in recent years, namely on television, and the growing percentage of females in the workforce, substantial underrepresentation of women in the news has remained. To explore journalists' social and professional world as a milieu of the lived profes...

A Revista Comunicando convida a comunidade científica a submeter trabalhos sobre “Comunicação, Género e Sexualidades” até dia 8 de maio de 2023. Esta secção tem como intenção abranger as temáticas que contribuam para as reflexões e discussões críticas sobre as condições e os desafios contemporâneos implicadas nos modos de existência e vivências de...

In recent decades, marked by the supposedly universal access to different types of social media, we have seen the emergence of forms of popular feminism embedded in complex dynamics. Often cohabiting in these dynamics are ambivalent ideas and imaginaries that both reject and express feminist issues. Particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, the us...

Depois de a pandemia de COVID-19 ter sido declarada pela Organização Mundial de Saúde em março de 2020, um conjunto de medidas sanitárias foram adotadas internacionalmente para controlar a expansão do vírus. De entre estas, os confinamentos e isolamentos tiveram como consequência a adoção generalizada de tecnologias de comunicação como mediadoras e...

As the Covid-19 pandemic intensified the digitisation of everyday lives and violent behaviours on many mainstream platforms, online violence against women raised renewed concerns. Across the literature, there has been an emphasis on survivors’ experiences and actions to cope with technology-facilitated abuse. Still, little is known about how people...

In this chapter, we explore the symbolic nature and the experiential dimension, of self-tracking apps to stress the importance of the ideas and discourses conveyed by popular self-tracking apps, as well as the sensations, emotions, and human embodiment enacted in daily uses and their connections to gendered power relations.

A investigação tem mostrado que as interações e os processos narrativos coletivos que delas decorrem em plataformas baseadas em aplicações móveis (m-apps) aprimoram as relações sociais de poder, perpetuando masculinidades e feminilidades hegemónicas ancoradas à heteronormatividade (Amaral et al., 2021). As masculinidades e as feminilidades represen...

Partindo da consideração das liberdades de comunicação e da conflitualidade nas interações comunicativas, trazemos à colação neste capítulo alguns dos desafios que se colocam ao ensino do jornalismo, particularmente no campo das relações ético-jurídicas. Refletimos em especial sobre os desafios decorrentes de uma paisagem comunicacional em profunda...

News coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic has been poorly reflecting how journalists have had to deal with their private lives and the way they report daily on events related to the ongoing public health emergency. Female and male reporters are at the front of the news and have to face the risk of contagion to do their work, besides having to deal wit...

Ao tomar decisões sobre o uso de medicamentos durante a gravidez, as mulheres consultam muitas fontes de informação, especialmente a internet (Lupton et al., 2016). Ao mesmo tempo em que o YouTube pode ser um incentivo para as mulheres discutirem o acompanhamento da gravidez com seus/suas profissionais de saúde (Hansen et al., 2016), a plataforma t...

Resumo: Nos últimos anos, têm sido profusamente questionadas as consequências para o jornalismo do alargamento do espaço público e da interação em rede, não raro articu-lando o envolvimento dos públicos na produção de conteúdos com a importância histórica outorgada aos media na democratização do discurso. Perante a crescente abundância de evidência...

How users engagement with mobile apps to self-monitor and improve health and fitness has recently attracted scholarly attention. Conducted from a user and design perspective, much research has been concentrated on women’s use of pregnancy and parenting apps, showing at least two positive impacts: on emotional support and access to medical care info...

In this paper, we present a review of research on online abuse against women journalists. Evidence gathered shows the high prevalence of abuse toward female professionals and the cross-contextual (i.e., online and offline) occurrence of such harms. The impacts are not only personal but also societal, reinforcing the bounding of the public sphere.

Online and offline realms are not detached one from the other but are rather convergent and mutually reinforcing. Over the past decade, as the so-called “digital era” emerged and expanded, expressions of misogynist beliefs started to burgeon within the online realm. On par with male misogynist individualised agency, there has also been a growth of...

The last decade witnessed great transformations concerning the internet with the perils of disinformation becoming key concerns among political actors. Within this framework, the EU has developed efforts to approach these digital challenges taking into account the political challenges. These challenges are related with elections and trust in inform...

Age and gender intersect within power relations dynamics from which arise social hierarchies. Ageist and patriarchal systems perform power within an institutionalization of normative gendered hierarchy, validated by the media and legitimized through the hegemonic social culture. Aging masculinities have been mainly studied in health and social scie...

From a feminist perspective, mainstream media representations have always performed disciplinary functions. Particularly, regarding ageing women. On digital platforms, individuals would have a greater agency to perform and shape gender norms and sexual roles. However, scholarship has been expressing scepticism with the liberatory promise of the onl...

The Internet and digital technologies have delivered countless benefits to journalism. However, they also raised new opportunities to attack journalists with impunity, especially female journalists, impacting their credibility and affecting women's public participation. This chapter draws on feminist thinking and presents a review of impactful rese...

Feminist activism has always promoted informal learning opportunities for men and women. Internet, along with ICTs, has expanded these opportunities by affording large-scale feminist mobilisation and connection. Yet, the digital environment is not only enhancing feminist campaigning but also facilitating the contexts for abusive behaviours to flour...

Saber se os media, particularmente os media informativos, construíram na última década o problema da violência contra as mulheres nas relações de intimidade através de imaginários mais emancipadores é a questão nuclear do estudo que se apresenta, conduzido a partir do recurso à análise crítica do discurso e tendo por base um corpus constituído por...

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought considerable challenges to higher education institutions around the world. Everywhere, during the spring of 2020, students and teaching staff were sent home to implement non-presential classes, which were seen as an emergency solution for the outbreak. However, the new academic year brought a mixed approach with co...

COVID-19 brought tremendous challenges to the world during 2020. The consequences of the pandemic are still hard to estimate. However, the socio-economic crisis that hit every nation, from major developed economies to least developed countries is transversal and quite visible. Despite the existence of various context-specific approaches, there is a...

The relations between gender, power and politics resonate deeply in the media representation of women in the political field, normalizing models of femininity and conceptions of participation in the public sphere. Based on this assumption and using an intersectional approach anchored to a feminist perspective, this article draws on critical themati...

The recent wave of disinformation has been posing enormous challenges to an already complex information ecosystem. People feel overwhelmed by the amount of information that is consumed every day. It is increasingly harder to navigate the sea of information in empowering forms. That is why digital and media literacies have been emphasized as key too...

The knowledge society is currently characterized by an intrinsic disorder caused by several kinds of wrong or misused information. It is increasingly difficult for both students and professors to safely navigate in this highly complex ecosystem, that was transformed by the rise of new players and practices, as well as new mechanisms of participatio...

Journalism education, as we know it, has its roots in the United States, during the late 19th century, when some universities started to discuss how journalism should be taught. Throughout the 20th century, journalism education became widespread through higher education institutions around the world. However, teaching aspiring journalists still pla...

Community media have been used for empowering fragile or at-risk groups for decades. Radio has a long tradition in this field, precisely for its capabilities for overcoming distances and lack of instruction, as well as for its easiness of use. Participatory radios are produced exclusively by the community and for the community. Since the advent of...

Media, informação e literacia: rumos e perspetivas reúne um leque diversificado de olhares e de vozes sobre a relação entre Media, Informação e Literacia, na tentativa de documentar rumos e discutir perspetivas aparentemente triunfantes no contexto internacional e num horizonte interdisciplinar. No seu conjunto, esses contributos alimentam o aciden...

A produção colaborativa, a interação em rede e os comentários online dos utilizadores multiplicaram as possibilidades de participação cívica no espaço público digital, mas também aumentaram a conflitualidade nas relações comunicativas. Com efeitos que se estendem ao sistema mediático mais amplo, este fenómeno afeta de um modo particular o jornalism...

This paper is focused on gender, media and information and communication technologies (ICTs). Through the analysis of relevant policy documents about the media, the access to and use of ICTs adopted by European institutional players in the last twenty years, we identify and discuss the presence of gender-focused principles and the media dimensions...

In September 2015, following the ratification of Istanbul Convention by Portugal, addressing someone with unwanted verbal “sexual proposals” became a criminal offence. This however, barely meets the requirements of the treaty and is far from what was first discussed about sexual harassment both in the Portuguese Parliament and more broadly in the m...

Refletir sobre as implicações sociais das práticas jornalísticas. Espera-se que, no final da atividade, as/os participantes reconheçam os média jornalísticos como estruturas de mediação da formação do conhecimento sobre si e sobre o mundo, estabeleçam relações entre a estratificação social e os sistemas de valores que o menu noticioso transporta e...

Internet y las redes sociales han cambiado significativamente la forma en que se produce y distribuye la información. La inmediatez que se asocia a las redes sociales junto con su capacidad de acceso global dentro del contexto específico del periodismo de proximidad sitúa a dichas redes sociales, como una herramienta fundamental a la hora de llevar...

This paper uses critical thematic analysis to explore the news media coverage of a rape allegation case against the football player Cristiano Ronaldo. After providing the context of the case, we examine the literature on how rape cases are represented by the news media. We then proceed to a critical thematic analysis of a purposive sample of Portug...

Book review

https://doi.org/10.14195/2183-6019_7_0

Mediapolis, n.º 7

Call for Articles Special Issue of Brazilian Journalism Research: Journalism and Trafficking: Developments and Perspectives

5 Nunca como hoje os territórios interdisciplinares da pesquisa em comunicação, media e género se in-tersetaram de forma tão significativa e profícua. Com raízes fora da academia, o investimento na compreensão e supe-ração das desigualdades entre homens e mulheres coexiste, influencia e é in-fluenciado pelo trabalho académico no domínio das minoria...

Tal como outras áreas da violência contra as mulheres, o tráfico para exploração sexual tornou-se na última década crescentemente politizado na sociedade portuguesa, com os media de informação a concederem a esta prática uma importante visibilidade, tanto no domínio da conscientização pública como no plano da reação governamental. Isso aconteceu ap...

Like other areas of violence against women, sex trafficking has become in the last decade increasingly politicized in Portuguese society, with the news media attaching important visibility to it, both for public awareness purposes and government reaction. This happened after the dismantling of a chain of striptease clubs, suspected of hosting traff...

To map the stereotypes presented in media representations constituted a good part of the former feminist media studies research, worried with the decisive ideological relevance of those dynamics. Nowadays, however, in a time in which the media culture seems to depoliticize inequality and stereotyping, this is a contested investment. In this work, w...

Research in the area of communication and media, on the one hand, and in crime and criminal justice, on the other, has been investing in understanding the relationship between their subjects of study. This has been, however, an investment marked by mutual disregard, if not by mutual distrust, despite sharing theoretical and methodological influence...

This is a Journal of communication, journalism and public space. The theme is Journalism Education in the 21st Century. I have published the photographic project "Flights & Falls" in this journal.

Nowadays, journalism is under major changes. In particular, the digital revolution has brought profound changes in the way news is produced and consumed, as well as in the professional identity. It is, moreover, transformations that seem to penalize female professional, perpetuating gender inequalities. In this paper, we focus precisely on how thes...

Os textos que reunimos nesta edição mostram bem a complexidade dos desafios da digitalização e das redes sociais nas sociedades contemporâneas. Uma das principais consequências é visível na reconfiguração dos próprios media. Com efeito, a digitalização veio não apenas permitir como também estimular a convergência entre meios originalmente independe...

Compreender o papel desempenhado pela imprensa portuguesa no processo de reconhecimento público da violência contra as mulheres, especialmente da violência ocorrida no seio das relações de intimidade, é o objetivo deste artigo. Ocupam-nos as questões de saber (1) em que medida (re)configura a imprensa os referenciais discursivos subjacentes ao prob...

As a mode of discourse and textual superstructure, narrative plays a nuclear role in construing social reality as well as in creating social identities. That is why the study of narrative is one of the most important investigations of human activity, as Roland Barthes suggested long ago. In fact, it configures the common denominator of cultures of...

The importance of crime and punishment in mediated societies presupposes considering the field of the media as a legitimate field for the discovery and problematization of the ideas and arguments that are symbolically built and conveyed in the public sphere. In parallel with this analytical effort, it also presupposes an investment in understanding...

Resumo o tráfico de mulheres foi alvo de discussões recentes no espaço público nacional, tendo conduzido à redefinição de fronteiras normativas a respeito do tráfico e da imi-gração. Como marco simbólico de uma dinâmica de desvio/controlo é possível iden-tificar o desmantelamento de uma organização suspeita de tráfico ligada à cadeia de striptease...

Ocupar-nos-á neste texto uma área pouco explorada entre nós, mas que, como procuraremos mostrar, tem forte relevância para as questões de género, nomeadamente no seu cruzamento com as práticas mediáticas.

Partindo do pressuposto de que as representações mediáticas sinalizam e dão a ver de certos modos e não de outros os problemas sociais e, ao mesmo tempo, reproduzem, desafiam ou naturalizam modelos de identidade, assim como conceções de moral e de justiça, este livro analisa as representações da violência contra as mulheres produzidas pela imprensa...