Research Areas

The PPGCTS – operating within the Science, Technology and Society field – is made up of three research areas:

Area 1 – Social dimensions of Science and Technology: 

Aims to develop studies investigating the socio-historical grounding and the gaps and obstacles with which important social segments currently apprehend the scientific-technological phenomena. It covers the development of research on the following themes: social studies of science and technology; science, technology and values; STS education, science and technology literacy; communication, participation and the public understanding of science, technology and innovation; science, ethics, health, ageing and solidarity economy; gender in science and technology; technoscience; technological change; risk society and sustainable development; science, technology and innovation in society indicators; social organization of S&T; trajectories of scientists, technologists and research groups and their relationship to disciplinary trajectories and to emerging fields; policies and management of ST&I; memory of science and technology; science and technology discourse; ST&I in health and social technologies.

Area 2 – Technology Management and Sustainable Society

Seeks to understand present and future technological opportunities and challenges confronted by organizations in the private and public sectors for the formulation of strategies for sustainable, social, economic and environmental development, and for public policymaking in science, technology and innovation. As a central theme, production and management methods of information and knowledge are researched in areas like: technology forecasting; competitive intelligence and technological monitoring; innovation; historical analysis of technologies; basic industrial technology; development of processes and products; production and analysis of ST&I indicators; technology management; technology cooperation networks; entrepreneurship for sustainable development; citizen participative research; information and communication technologies for management, among other subjects. 

Area 3 – Language, Communication and Science

Aims to investigate the several manifestations of languages – oral, written, still image and audio-visual – employed in scientific and cultural communication through studies that focus on the forms of elaboration, dissemination and reception of formalized science articulated with popular knowledges. The theoretical and methodological premises that underpin this research have the aim of analysing the formal and systematic structures of texts and ways of formulation and functioning of scientific and cultural discourses. In this context, the area prioritizes research that seeks to understand the process of knowledge transfer in relation to the following domains: discursive practices of subjects, authors and readers in the images, the discourses employed in science and the discourses of popular knowledges, audio-visual products in the different media in scientific and cultural communication, the discourse and the subject in print and digital domains, pragmatic and discursive changes in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese in the context of the scientific and cultural media.