Entre afetações e representatividades comunicativas: as dinâmicas da circuitagem a partir do que o Papa Francisco diz e faz

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates the communicative representativeness of Pope Francis and his interactional experiments within the dynamics of media circulation. The study is conducted within the context of mediatization, an environment composed of a diversity of media-interactive logics that transform and reconfigure the way everything and everyone lives in society. For this reason, the research focuses on identifying the communicative, especially symbolic, representativeness intrinsic to the papal office but which are particular to the way Francis led and governed the Catholic Church.His way of governing, in some situations, borders on experimentation compared to what is already consolidated in the institution's ways of being. Based on what the Pope says and does, the research problem is elaborated: how do Pope Francis's communicative representativeness mobilize interactional experiments in the relationship between participants, systems, and the environment? How does the set of impacts from this relationship trigger circuitry logics? Therefore, through multiple cases of circulation, the objective is to understand how these representativeness are triggered when we observe interactions in circulation dynamics. The investigation comprises three distinct cases: 1) Civil union of homosexuals, which relates a doctrinal issue to an internal problem of the Church, reflecting in society; 2) Synodality Synod, which deals with the internal structure and organization of the Catholic Church, generating hierarchical problems with the "sharing of power"; and 3) Peace Negotiation, which examines the Pope's participation in attempting to mediate the war between Russia and Ukraine, highlighting the Church's diplomacy in a scenario of social calamity. This study examines the specific situations of each individual case to understand how agonistics enhance communicative experiments originating in the tension between what is normative to the institution in which the Pope is inscribed and what is experimental. By articulating the specific inferences of each case with the theoretical discussions concerning the logics of media circuits, the communicative representativeness in circulation in a space of value and the relationship between systems and environment, it was possible to identify that the reverberation of events involving Pope Francis already reaches us from media constructions and in a web of meanings and impacts; the Pope's presence includes representative and/or symbolic participations that go beyond the exclusive role of the leader of Catholicism; and the impacts that result from media circuits are what feed these circuits back, however, with other layers of meaning and impacts. Therefore, we identified that the three processes outline the movements of circuiting, whose feedback is neither uniform nor previously established, but manifests itself in its way according to circulation dynamics.