Representações sociais de ciência em memes: uma análise semiótica

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the social representations of science in memes through a semiotic analysis, understanding how these cultural artifacts reveal perceptions, common sense, and discourses about science in contemporary digital culture. The research is based on Serge Moscovici's Theory of Social Representations and Peirce's Semiotics, from Santaella's perspective, starting from the premise that memes are symbolic manifestations, full of meanings that, when circulating on networks, translate ways of thinking and signifying scientific knowledge in everyday social and cultural life. This is a qualitative, documentary research study of a set of memes collected from the internet and archived in a personal file. To organize the corpus, a division into two main axes of analysis was created. The first, called "Science: its contents and characters," encompasses memes that appropriate scientific concepts, popular knowledge, and historical figures of science to construct effects of humor, irony, and social criticism. The second, entitled "The teaching of science in the view of memes," includes those that specifically address pedagogical practices, student difficulties, and the tensions and conflicts of the educational process. The analysis revealed that memes can function as mediators between scientific discourse and the social imaginary, evidencing the loss of neutrality when appropriated in the digital context and reinterpreted in cultural, social, and political practices, materializing the tensions between formal knowledge and everyday knowledge. In this way, humor and irony operate as discursive strategies of approximation, allowing subjects to communicate perceptions about science from different perspectives. Finally, the research reveals that the social representations of science expressed in memes do not diminish the value of scientific knowledge, but rather reinscribe it in a network of symbolic meanings that makes it closer to everyday realities. By articulating semiotics and social representations, this thesis contributes to the understanding of the relationships between science, language, and culture in contemporary social collectives. In this way, memes can translate, with humor and a critical tone, the ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in science in the connected world.