The core focus of the group is, in the field of communication sciences, the analysis of cultural phenomena through a critical perspective. The presupposition is that communication has a crucial role as the enabler of meaning to the multidimensionality of culture, patent in the discursive, imagetic, aural and other regimes of mediation, and is as such inseparable from retention techniques and devices, as much as from the arts and creative practices that allow culture to reinvent itself.

Its main fields of interest, both in fundamental and applied research, are the rapports between: 1) contemporary culture and mediation/retention technologies; 2) textual, imagetic and narrative materialities; 3) media archaeology, archives and patrimonial heritage; 4) arts and creative practices. Between 2013-2017 these were accomplished through the wide themes of cultural identity and body representations.

In the period 2018-2022, the group will instantiate the unit’s agenda of cultural and societal challenges through the following research clusters.

1) The culture of online participation. In 2017 there was a submission, under evaluation from FCT, for specific funding of a project related to the political participation of online non-official networks in electoral periods. Ongoing research and future proposals include the issues of transmedia literacy and fandom, and of software as a structure of knowledge and power.

2) Arts, archives and patrimonial collections in the digital era. A European funded project on collective stories about the African continent is in course. Three other projects were submitted, under evaluation by FCT: one on the communicational practices in the Portuguese art field, another on the cultural reception of X-rays in Portugal, and a third on the photographic impulse in filmic colonial archives. The group will also be focused in issues such as the comparative archaeology between analog and digital media, and the ecologies of digital arts.