The Technoscientific imaginaries and meaning-making research macroproject investigates how Science and Technology circulate culturally through images, narratives, professions, institutions and expectations of the future, participating in what subjects recognize as possible, desirable, distant or unlikely. The project focuses on the semiotic processes through which technoscientific signs are appropriated, translated and reorganized across school, media and everyday experiences, connecting scientific culture, education, subjectivity and life projects.
Research question
How do culturally articulated meanings surrounding Science and Technology model the professional, educational and existential horizons formulated by different subjects?
Status
Ongoing
Coordinator: Glaucio Aranha
Research group: CLASS
Science and Technology as cultural signs
The project approaches Science and Technology as signs that acquire meaning through their relationships with other cultural texts, including school experiences, media products, family discourses, professional repertoires and social expectations. This perspective makes it possible to examine how particular conceptions of science, university, research, innovation or the future become culturally stabilized while remaining open to displacement and resignification through subjects’ concrete experiences.
Life projects as prospective cultural texts
One of the hypotheses developed within the project understands the life project as a form of prospective cultural text, constructed through symbolic materials available in the present and traversed by concrete conditions of existence. From this perspective, imagining a professional trajectory involves recognizing institutions, people, languages, stages and possible movements between a current situation and a future horizon. The analysis follows the operations through which these elements become narratable, remain absent or acquire new meanings.
Theoretical dialogues
Yuri Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics provides a central axis, particularly through the concepts of semiosphere, boundary, translation and modelling. The project also engages with Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s sociotechnical imaginaries, Arjun Appadurai’s capacity to aspire and Louise Archer and colleagues’ discussion of science capital, creating a dialogue among meaning-making, inequality, recognition and the cultural construction of futures.
Research axes
- technoscientific imaginaries and scientific culture;
- Science and Technology as cultural signs;
- media, audiovisual culture and the public circulation of scientific representations;
- youth, life projects and possible futures;
- semiosis, cultural boundaries and translation processes;
- relationships among cultural recognition, belonging and participation in scientific trajectories.
Related research
The project continues earlier investigations with upper-secondary students concerning the signs Science and Technology in their life projects, returning to existing corpora through new analytical questions and broadening the inquiry to the ways in which images of science and technology participate in the cultural construction of possible trajectories. The work remains situated, treating empirical materials as records of meaning-making operations performed in specific contexts.
Institutional connections
The research is developed at the NUTES Institute of Science and Health Education at UFRJ and within CLASS, connecting semiotics, media studies, science education, science communication and research on scientific culture.