Abstracts Political Science

A efemeridade e a permanência : práticas informacionais em perfil do Instagram com a temática de ciência e maternidade

by Patrícia Valerim

This thesis deals with the study of informational practices on Instagram regarding the topic of science and maternity. It presents the following problem statement: How are informational practices put into place on the Instagram profile that makes science communication? The guiding objective of the study was to understand the informational practices undertaken on the Instagram profile @maternidade.com.ciencia, from stories and comments published in the feed. The study followed the method of applied netnography, with a qualitative approach and exploratory-descriptive design. The thesis discusses topics related to informational practices, digital ambience, digital influence, science communication, social media and Instagram, with an eye to their conceptual and contextual aspects and establishing relationships between them. We reflect on the incidence of a peculiar type of digital influence, involving the scientist and the audience around topics related to science knowledge that help in everyday social demands. Due to the individual and collective dimensions of the subjects involved (Instagrammer scientist and followers); the typology of published data (image and text); and the duality found on Instagram – ephemerality (stories) and permanence (feed), the methodological course involved bringing together different procedures and analysis techniques, settling on a multimethod approach. Therefore, we made use of unsystematic observation, unobtrusive participation, Content Analysis (BARDIN, 2011) and Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (HERRING, 2004, 2007). Thus, from the stories, the corpus consisted of 220 posts from March to April 2021, and from the feed, the corpus comprised 245 threads referring to the first four months of 2021. The analysis of the data collected from stories pointed to informational practices listed in eight categories that emerged, namely: information actions, context, humanization strategies, sources, hypermedia, tagged profiles, editing resources and intentionality. The feed data analysis was carried out from the perspective of social and situational factors adapted from Herring (2007), which comprised six categories: participant characteristics, theme, participation structure, thread length, motivating topic and speech tone. The informational practices identified empirically are based both on instrumental matters related to technological devices, and on perspectives that involve several factors, including self-expression of ideas and intentions of the scientist who idealized the profile (individual aspects) and the audience – essentially composed of women (collective aspects), in relation to everyday issues. It also has to do with the conjunctures that encompass disinformation around scientific approaches related to the health of this public, including political action such as activism in favor of a society with more gender equity, especially in the academic environment. The informational practices carried out by the subjects involved in this research revealed informational and communicational…