Cafés científicos: interações entre a comunidade científica e a sociedade civil em um espaço público de comunicação da ciência

Abstract

This thesis was developed from the project Barômetro Ciência, café e debate, a Science Cafe promoted by Diretoria de Divulgação Científica da UFMG in partnership with Centro Cultural UFMG and the institutional radio team, 104,5 UFMG Educativa. Science Cafes are public spaces that are configured as a meeting place for the scientific community and civil society discuss about science. This thesis considers the hypothesis that from these meetings can emerge images of science on the speech of the scientific community representatives and images of science on the speech of civil society representatives. The theoretical research highlights the models of public communication of science of Lewestein (2003) and Bernsteins (1990) conception of pedagogical devices, beyond the concepts of multimodality and multimodal environments of Kress (2004) and Martin, Daly and Thurston (2005) and the processes of instructional design of Smith and Ragan (1999). Three different contexts of Science Cafes were analyzed to focus on discursive interactions between scientific community and civil society promoted by the multimodal pedagogical device created by the project. The qualitative approach was the main methodological procedure for information collecting and the thematic analysis of Riessman (2007) was used for the categorization of themes and subthemes at one event selected for analysis. The conclusions were guided through this process of categorization and showed images of science presented in the discourse of the scientific community and of civil society representatives. The most significant contribution of the scientific community was to present science as a complex and nonlinear activity, which has its internal conflicts, that makes mistakes and that cannot provide solutions to the problems in general. On the part of civil society, the most significant contribution was to demonstrate little familiarity with the processes and ways of working of scientific activity, entering in the context of science discussion when they experience problems related to it.