Múltiplos olhares, múltiplas mediações : as representações sociais da ruralidade entre os jovens rurais da microrregião de Santa Cruz do Sul.

Abstract

The social and cultural transformations that have been occurring in the rural setting have led to the experience of many realities and to many glances at this space. Researchers of this subject like Maria José Carneiro, Maria de Nazareth Baudel Wanderley, Valmir Luiz Stropasolas and Elisa Guaraná Castro affirm that in view of significant differences according to the analyzed territory and the countless possibilities in the rural environment nowadays, we cannot talk about a rurality anymore instead we must approach “ruralities”. One of the ways to perceive the various faces of rurality is through the social representations that the subjects construct from the reality. The authors Serge Moscovici, Denise Jodelet, Celso Pereira de Sá and Sandra Jovchelovitch claim that they are expressed in words, feelings and attitudes by leading the subject to provide meaning to the world. Starting from this premise, this thesis has the objective of analyzing the social representations of rurality as conceived by the rural youth from the Microregion of Santa Cruz do Sul based on the Theory of Mediations proposed by Jesús Martín-Barbero that considers the introduction of information and communication technologies (TIC). The starting point are the mediations because they generate the social representations and to understand how the rurality is felt, experienced and told by the rural youth, one examines the way how the mediations (cultural competence, social temporality and family day-to-day life) pervade the construction of the social representations regarding rurality. The TICs are also taken into consideration to explore the way how communication technological innovations are inserted in the daily life of these youngsters and how they get hold of these technologies. The choice of the inquired subjects is justified by their protagonism which the youth, in general, has been developing and by the fact that it is a group that still requires studies when one consider the rural environment that so far basically concentrates researches related to family succession. The current research of qualitative character carried out semi-structured interviews with 14 youths dwelling in the rural area of the Microregion of Santa Cruz do Sul. The data analysis revealed that there are multiple ways of representing the rurality and few qualitative studies about the social representations of rurality. Most of them intend to categorize, from statistic data, images or words that represent the rural environment what somehow limits this approach. Among the findings of the research concerning mediations, it is understood that the group of mediations related to cultural competence and to social temporality are the most significant ones in the way how the inquired youths feel the surroundings where they live and such representations may become mediators in the process. It has also been found out that old representations get along with new ones and these will obviously depend on the ways of life and conditions from each region, reason why it is impossible to generalize such perspectives. Therefore, it is recommended that new studies be made with the objective of analyzing the multiple perspectives, multiple social representations and multiple rurality expressions in the contemporaneity.