Communication and Culture Research Center
The aim of the CECC (Research Center for Communication and Culture) is to promote and develop research in the areas of culture, literature, translation, language, and communication sciences, from a multidisciplinary perspective and encouraging relations between these different fields of knowledge, as well as the relations of each of them with other scientific areas.
The CECC forms an R&D unit, reformulating the Center of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature and Culture (CLCPB), and integrating scientific research in the
areas of Culture and Literature Studies and Communication Sciences, in a systemic and interdisciplinary collaboration between these two fields of knowledge and including international clusters of excellence that pursue the same academic goal.
The result of an awareness of the cultural and symbolic nature of acts of communicative mediation and of the institutions that govern them (newspapers, television, cinema, theater, literature, publishing, museums and the Internet), and also of the notion that all aesthetic acts, by creating meaning, seek to
communicate, is a twofold collaboration which transforms communication sciences into acts of culture and culture studies into communicative and symbolic acts.
The research produced in the Communication and Culture Research Center is undertaken within the crossover of these two suppositions, bringing together interdisciplinary teams from the scientific areas of literary studies, language studies, culture studies and communication sciences, who are united in an intersystemic discussion of central issues related to
how societies represent themselves, project their experiences and deal with the complexity of modernity. Scientific interests which are ancillary to the Center’s activity are the study of the creation of culture in modernity, the intersemiotic study of mediation (Luhmann, Kittler), intercultural dialogue/conflict, and the model of translation both as an interlinguistic reference and as a cultural element that permeates the interaction between peoples and cultures and defines the way they represent themselves.
Research Groups
The CECC lines of research are based on the development of scientific activity in three major areas:
The Structure of Representation – literary, visual;
Forms of intersystemic, intersemiotic and intercultural mediation;
Models of producing meaning in modernity.
Objectivos
a) To promote, coordinate and support lines and projects of research and study in the area of culture studies, literary studies, translations studies, language studies and communication sciences;
b) To promote and support the publication of the results of the research undertaken, and any works of interest for the development of its activity;
c) To encourage exchange with Portuguese peer institutions and with other scientific and cultural institutions in other countries;
d) To support the training and specialization of researchers in the scientific areas with which it is concerned;
e) To promote activities within a privileged relationship with the different research and teaching units of the Catholic University of Portugal, and in particular the Human Sciences Faculty;
f) To organize and collaborate in congresses, symposia, colloquia, seminars, specialist courses, scientific meeting and cycles of conferences.
Board of Directors of the CECC:
Professor Jorge Fazenda Lourenço (scientific coordinator)
Professor Isabel Capeloa Gil
Professor Teresa Seruya
Professor Helena Silva Alves
Professor Fernando Ilharco
Research Assistants
Master Catarina Duff Burnay
Master Diana Gonçalves
Master Inês Espada Vieira
Permanent External Committee for Scientific Advice
Professor Barbie Zelizer
(Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania)
Professor David E. Wellbery
(University of Chicago)
Professor Elisabeth Bronfen
(University of Zurich)
Professor Gabriele Brandstetter
(University of Berlin)
Professor Michael E. Schudson
(University of California, San Diego)
