UC Women in Science: Inês Amaral
Inês Amaral is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. She is a professor at the University of Coimbra and Coordinator of the Communication Section of the Department of Philosophy, Communication and Information of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the UC, and the February guest of 'UC Women in Science'.
For as long as she can remember, Inês Amaral has always wanted to be a journalist. After a brief detour into international relations, she studied social communication in Braga. Now a professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Coimbra, she believes she has followed the natural path for journalism students - to actually work in the field. She worked for Comum magazine at the University of Minho, for the regional newspaper Correio do Minho and for TSF radio.
Like many, however, she eventually became disenchanted with journalism and realised she could not change the world as she had hoped. This prompted her to explore other avenues, which led her to venture into academia.
She worked on online journalism in its early stages and later moved on to studying interaction design and integrating it with online journalism. Inês Amaral describes her work as highly interdisciplinary, intersecting with different fields and people.
Before focusing on gender, she had a strong interest in ageing, which led her to study media and digital literacy. Gender in the media, especially masculinities, has led to many published works.
With 'a life that revolves around journalism', she believes she is working in 'an increasingly interesting and interdisciplinary field'.
Looking at the current situation, she believes that "this crisis is an attack on journalism and an attack on democracy. Without journalism there is no pluralism and without pluralism there is no democracy," she says.
Watch the interview: (click to open YouTube and turn on closed captions [CC] in English).
Translation and subtitles: Diana Taborda and Karine Paniza
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Short Bio
Inês Amaral is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Coimbra. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho, and is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and a collaborating researcher at the Centre for Communication and Social Studies of the University of Minho. Her research interests include sociability in digital social networks; participation and social media; feminist media studies; masculinities, gender and media; media and digital literacy; technologies and active ageing; audiences and media consumption in the digital age; and disinformation.
She was an Invited Scientist Fellow at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid within the founded project ENCAGE-CM (S2015/HUM-3367) and an Invited Professor at the University of Cape Verde. She is a certified lecturer in media literacy and media education by the Ministry of Education, the Journalists' Union and the Scientific-Pedagogical Council for Continuing Education.
She is the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project "MyGender - Mediated young adults practices: advancing gender justice in and across mobile apps (PTDC/COM-CSS/5947/2020) and Co-PI of the project MediaTrust.Lab - Local Media Lab for Civic Trust and Literacy (PTDC/COM-JOR/3866/2020). Currently, Inês is a team member of the funded projects YouNDigital - Youth, News and Digital Citizenship (PTDC/COM-OUT/0243/2021) and UnCoveR - Sexual Violence in Portuguese Mediascape (2022.03964.PTDC).
Inês Amaral has published work in the following journals: Social Media + Society, International Journal of Communication, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences, Media Studies e European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, e em coleções como Religion, Gender, and Populism in the Mediterranean (2024), The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence (Routledge, 2023), Digital Ageism (2023), The Routledge Companion to Gender, Sexuality and Culture (Routledge, 2022), Digital Convergence in Contemporary Newsrooms (Springer, 2022), Digital Media (McGraw-Hill, 2021), The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society (Sage, 2020) e The Future of Audiences (Palgrave, 2018).
As a feminist activist, she has been involved in several social movements for freedom of speech, gender equality, the right to gender self-determination and the fight for human rights.