Interview with José Luiz Braga

Mediatization and Interaction. The Part and the Whole

Abstract

José Luiz Braga, one of the leading figures in communication research in Brazil, obtained his doctorate from Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas in 1984 and was part of the same French research environment where Antônio Fausto Neto (who earned a doctorate in social sciences from the École des Hautes Études in 1982), Eliseo Verón (who earned a doctorate in Linguistics from Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis in 1985), and Muniz Sodré (who pursued postgraduate and postdoctoral studies at Université Sorbonne), among other leading academic figures in Latin America, were trained.
Marked by a solid background based on interactionist perspectives and the social construction of knowledge, which led him to a rapid distancing from French structuralism, Braga contributed to the founding, in Brazil, of the Associação Nacional de Pesquisas em Comunicação in 1991 and questioned – always in an up-to-date way – the distinction between communication research inherited from the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political economy), from language theories (currents of discourse and theories of the sign) and from informational studies marked by cybernetics, having as interlocutors other prominent Brazilian researchers such as the aforementioned Sodré, Wilson Gomes, Ciro Marcondes Filho, Luiz Signates and Lucrécia Ferrara, among others.
In this dialogue with InMediaciones de la Comunicación, Braga revisits one of the central questions that marked his research – the question of what communication is – and reflects on the ways in which his work related to studies on mediatization.