Program

Program Overview

Program Overview

The Graduate Program in Communication at PUC-Rio – Master’s and Doctoral degrees – was designed considering the challenges specific to Social Communication in today’s world, with a fast-paced expansion of the media environment. This landscape of complexities calls for an urgent examination of the social dimension of Communication, along with its meanings, experiences and practices that delineate contemporary culture.  Both graduate degrees have been structured around the same lines of research to ensure a continuous flow of knowledge production during the course of our student body’s academic development.  The Doctoral Program in Social Communication is the result of the academic maturity reached by the Department’s professors and researchers who have taught in the Master’s Program since August 2003.

The Doctoral Degree complements the already existing integration between the Undergraduate and Master’s programs.  In this sense, the Program strives to provide a fully integrated academic education, albeit diverse in its theoretical and methodological approaches.  Credits earned in the Master’s Program curriculum may be fully applied toward the Doctoral Degree.  Students applying from other programs may transfer as many credits as possible toward to the Doctoral Degree through a process of equivalency. Our department is open to welcoming new perspectives into the Graduate Program in Rio de Janeiro to avoid any possible problems with curriculum adaptation.   

As reflected in our program curricula and syllabi, the Master’s and Doctoral degree programs in Social Communication have been structured to allow students to choose from our offered lines of research and define their own object of research.  The Program’s lines of research were elaborated based on the scientific production of faculty members and following trends observed in the field.  The same process led to keeping the existing Master’s Degree Concentration Area – Social Communication the same for the Doctoral Degree. 

Objectives

The Master’s and Doctoral Degrees offered by PUC-Rio’s Graduate Program in Communication seek to qualify undergraduate and graduate students in Social Communication and other Human and Social Science programs for careers in academic teaching and scientific research in both the greater Rio de Janeiro area and other parts of Brazil.  The Graduate Program is open to international students through the many foreign exchange programs offered through PUC-Rio.

Therefore, the purpose of the program is to offer the necessary elements for our graduates to develop high quality research that will result in continuous scientific production.  Also, graduates will be fully qualified for academic teaching and acquire essential skills and attributes to serve as faculty members in the most renowned universities of Brazil and abroad.     

Our graduates will also possess the skills required to develop, manage and conduct communication projects for both social works and in the private sector by taking proactive initiatives to develop communication in Brazil.

With a fine-tuned combination of teaching and research, the Graduate Program in Communication is part of a continuous and decisive process of systematic academic enhancement carefully put into effect by the Department of Communication at PUC-Rio. In this way, we strive to provide our students with an essential body of knowledge for the study of Communication, its representations, productions and experiences as they materialize in today’s artistic, audiovisual and media culture, both by offering flexibility in their study program composition and aligning the various disciplines offered to the lines of research developed by the Program.   

Background

The Undergraduate Program in Social Communication at PUC-Rio was created more than 60 years ago. Initially established as a Journalism program in March 1951 by Decree No. 29312 of 2/28/1951, it was subsequently recognized by the Ministry of Education (MEC) through Decree No. 37738 of 8/10/1955. After the 1968 University Reform, the program was renamed to Social Communication, offered under the Department by the same name.  Over the course of next six decades, the program went through several changes driven by wider educational reforms, adapting to job market demands with a more versatile course of study that included Publicity & Advertising in addition to Journalism. A third discipline, Cinema Studies, was added in 2005.

Despite its long history, the Department of Social Communication at PUC-Rio was always careful not to venture towards a graduate program without first making sure its undergraduate program was efficiently organized.  Sure enough, in the last 20 years it has flourished into one of the most respected undergraduate programs in Journalism, Publicity & Advertising, and Cinema Studies in the country.  Its curriculum provides a comprehensive and critical education in Humanities. 

Therefore, our Master’s in Social Communication program was the natural result of an institutional and collective maturity process.  Approved by the CAPES CTC (the Technical and Scientific Council of Ministry of Education’s Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel) in December 2002, the Master’s program debuted in August 2003 with its first class of eleven admitted students. During that period, the program grew stronger and more complete, obtaining a four-point score by CAPES already on its first triennial evaluation and confirmed in its second 2007-2009 triennial review.

The implementation of the Master’s program has opened the possibility for students to obtain supervision of their research projects at higher levels of complexity, ensured by highly intellectually stimulated faculty members.   The Department’s faculty is further enriched by initiatives such as its academic periodical on communication, culture and politics,  "Alceu: Revista de Comunicação, Cultura e Política" (Qualis B2), the COMPÓS 2010 Conference and the recognition of PUC-Rio’s Publisher (Editora da PUC-Rio), linked to the “Comunicar” Project, by the Brazilian academic community.

 


PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA
DO RIO DE JANEIRO

Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 225
- Prédio Kennedy - 6° andar Gávea
Rio de Janeiro, RJ - Brasil - 22451-900
Cx. Postal: 38097
tel. +55 (21) 3527-1144 . poscom@puc-rio.br