A Decade of Panels on Narratives at the Brazilian Association of Journalism Researchers (SBPJor) (2004-2014)

Resumo

The purpose of this study is to analyze a period of ten year of articles presented as Narratives Panels at Brazilian Association of Journalism Researchers (SBPJor). It covers the period from 2004 to 2014. In 2004 the first panel was presented at the Second National Meeting of Researchers in Journalism at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA/BA). In 2014, the 8th panel was held at the XII Meeting at the University of Santa Cruz do South (Unisc/RS), totaling a range of ten years of activities. There were two Narrative panels in 2006, 2009 and 2010, but no one in the years of 2012 and 2013. This study is divided into two parts. The first relates to the analysis of the profile of the authors, revealing the main authors and career mobility in the field of communication and, more specifically, of Journalism who are devoted to the study of Narratives. The second part involves the analysis of the articles, based on the study of the key words, revealing the wide range of reflections on contemporary narratives, as well the balance of theoretical and empirical communications. It was used content analysis from the perspective of the French theoretical Laurence Bardin. After collecting of corpus it was made an initial reading (Bardin, 2011: 126) of all 47 articles selected to allow familiarization with the documents. This procedure allowed us to identify the registration units. Based on this initial investigation it was stablished the two main axes of analysis: 1) the author's profile (name, title, institution to which he was bound at the time of research presentation). The update of the last two data (title and institution) allowed to observe the mobility of researchers from the panel presentation to the current date; 2) the article content (through keywords, we attempted to identify what the Brazilian research community refers by narrative studies). As this is an empirical work, the main theoretical reference used was on the method of content analysis. We opted for the French theoretical approach by Laurence Bardin, which previous studies have shown to be the most used in Brazil to date. From the professional mobility point of view, the results highlighted the stability of researchers in public institutions (40%), followed by permanence of researchers in private institutions of prestige (17%), such as the Pontifical Catholic Universities (PUCs MG, Rio and SP). The investigation period of ten years also allowed noting the researcher carrier progress (17%), showing the evolution from undergraduate, masters and doctoral phases in this period. The study also pointed out the aim of researchers to move from private educational institutions, especially colleges, to public institutions (10%), which in Brazil represents, sometimes in a historical and even symbolic way, a more stable employment opportunity for professors. It has also been noted young trained researchers giving up the academic field to work in journalism market (7%). On the Narrative panels´content of articles, results showed a fair balance between empirical (49%) and theoretical (47%) works. This data apparently is in line with the association's (SBPJor) policy to accept only submissions dealing with journalism studies which are not mere literature reviews. It was noted also the close relationship of narrative studies in related fields such as linguistics (44%) and history (7%) as well as the studies of media products such as documentaries (7%). Finally, it was evident that Brazilian researchers’ do not employ the keywords area to highlight its methodological approach (8%). References to theoretical still prevail strongly in the community, to the detriment of the chosen methodological approach.