Universidad Veracruzana

Orientation

The Master’s Degree in Culture and Communication Studies is oriented to the training of researchers.

Justification

The profound transformations in the cultural and communications fields in recent decades, present new situations, contexts, forms and debates on social reality that demand the attention of the academy to unveil the structures and dynamics of these accelerated changes, the forms and contents assumed by the actors and collective projects of the communicational and cultural field, as well as their articulations, increasingly evident in the current moment marked by digital communication and the deepening of local-global relations in cultural life. Therefore, it is necessary to generate useful knowledge in theoretical and practical terms that allow the documentation and analysis of sociocultural change linked to communicational processes, as well as the reflection on them and the possible incidence on their impacts. The Universidad Veracruzana is not a stranger but a substantive actor in the production of this type of knowledge of the changing world in which it is located and which gives it meaning and raison d’être. This Plan of Studies is directed to be part of the production of this academic-research knowledge of the social transformations that mark the present.

Mission

To train academic personnel of the highest level who can recognize, analyze and understand the complex problematic of the relationships between culture, power and society, as well as the ideological and spatial-temporal determinants that operate in cultural and communicational manifestations, with the purpose of providing them with resources to apply in practice the knowledge acquired in the program, and thus, to form specialists with the capacity for informed social impact.

Vision

To become, in the medium term, a master’s degree of international competence that trains highly qualified scientists and that positions itself as a reference in this field of studies due to its innovative theoretical, methodological and thematic perspectives. Graduates will be able to continue their preparation with a complementary doctorate in the areas of social sciences and humanities, making the master’s degree a reference in the studies of culture and communication in Mexico.

Objectives

General Objective

Based on the theoretical underpinning, the postgraduate program has a central curricular objective: To train high-level teachers who are capable of approaching the critical and rigorous analysis of international, national and regional cultural and communicative phenomena, from different disciplines of the social sciences and humanities.

Specific objectives

In order to achieve the general objective we divide it into the following particular objectives:

1. 1. To train teachers capable of analyzing the formation, transformation, conflict and negotiation of individual and collective identities through cultural production (music, film, video, arts, literature, etc.), social movements, politics and social and cultural practices, seen as dynamic processes of interaction within the fields of power.
   2. To train teachers capable of reviewing the problems derived from the social production of meaning that social, political and cultural actors carry out through the media, as well as the study of the media as carriers and generators of identities, at the national, regional, state and local levels.
   3. To train teachers competent to study the role played by the media in the daily forms of state formation, the role played by the media in the interactions and negotiations carried out within the public sphere between social, political and cultural actors, the market and the state and its institutions.
   4. To train teachers capable of analyzing the discourses, symbolic supports and all those cultural practices put into play in everyday life, which are carriers and generators of both identities and subjectivities and which contribute to the construction of the memory of a country, a region, a state, a people.
   5. To train teachers with the competencies to study the transformations of the media (press, radio, television, photography, cinema, new technologies and others), through time, the factors (economic, political, cultural, technological and social) that have caused these transformations and, by means of the tools of cultural history, to analyze the changes that have occurred, the use of these media, their relationship with daily life, reading practices and cultural consumption.
   6. To train teachers capable of carrying out a historical reconstruction of memory through documents and other non-standard sources such as oral tradition, life stories, popular lyrics, among others, and the documentation of living traditions through printed or audiovisual media.