Researchers Ana Jorge, Maria José Brites, Teresa Sofia Castro, and Carla Cerqueira attended the 73rd annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA). The conference took place in Toronto and brought together scholars around the theme Reclaiming Authenticity in Communication. Scholars were invited to examine how authenticity has become a variable, rather than a constant, in public discourses and popular culture across the globe, and with what relational, social, political, and cultural implications.
Ana Jorge presented the paper "Coaching to disconnect? facilitating empowerment". The paper, authored with Patrícia Dias, marks the conclusion of the project Dis/Connect funded by EEA grants, and approached disconnection coaches by presenting an analysis of their pedagogies and the rewards of learning and change.
Researcher Maria José Brites presented the work "Facets of news avoidance and news consumption intermittencies". The work was presented at the pre-conference "News avoidance, resistance, and related audience practices: definitions, predictors, and consequences" and was developed together with researcher Rita Figueiras, in the scope of the research project YouNDigital - Youth, News and Digital Citizenship (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021).
For her part, Teresa Sofia Castro participated in a panel entitled Engaged CAM Research, presenting a work entitled "Engaged research with children and families: collecting and presenting data with methodological responsibility". In this paper the researcher reflected on methodological responsibility, innovation in research, and the use of creative methods in children and media research.
Carla Cerqueira, the principal investigator of the research project FEMglocal - Glocal feminist movements: interactions and contradictions (PTDC/COM-CSS/4049/2021), delivered a presentation titled “Transnational Feminist Activism: The #MeToo Case in Portugal” on Saturday. The paper, developed in collaboration with Célia Taborda (Co-PI of the project) and Ana Sofia Pereira (FEMglocal's Post-doc Fellow), was produced within the framework of the FEMglocal project and presented in the session on “Feminist Activism and #MeToo: Global and Comparative Cases”.
