Sérgio Barbosa dos Santos Silva is Junior Researcher at the University of Brasilia, Brasil.
PhD in Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, University of Coimbra, Portugal (2024)
MA in Political Sociology, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brasil (2017)
Teaching diploma in Sociology, University of Brasília, Brasil (2015)
BA in Sociology, University of Brasília, Brasil (2014)
Digital Literacy; Critical Pedagogy; Disinformation; Global South(s); Digital Sociology
Duration
3 months, June 2026 - August 2026
Host at the University of Passau
Dr. Arthur Oliveira Bueno
(Chair of Political Science with a focus on Comparative Government)
Digital literacy is a central topic to foster the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes to provide an essential framework for critical lifelong engagement with platforms, yet one that has been mainly debated in the Global North countries. Against this background, Dr. Barbosa dos Santos Silva's project focuses on Brazil, subject of an ongoing pilot case. It emphasizes the agency of young people to play a multi-disciplinary role to curb disinformation at the school level. It poses the following research question: how can educators design digital literacies pedagogical approaches in order to curb disinformation? The goals are twofold. First, it seeks to overcome the current academic disregard for the exploration of peripheral ways of using and understanding digital literacies, while designing critical pedagogies that constitute frameworks beyond Western Europe and the US. Second, the project seeks to break through the silos of academic disciplines currently looking at digital literacy based on technological solutionism. The analysis is structured via three research axes: digital literacy (to foster awareness and basic understanding of platform society), critical pedagogy (critical understanding the social, economic, cultural and technical aspects of platforms), and co-creation (to achieve personal and civic goals with the help of others). In doing so, this project designs pluriversal paths beyond data universalism, mainly situating contextual inequalities, socio-cultural nuances and disinformation ecosystem from the Global South(s), while avoiding a one-dimensional view of the world. The outcomes include a co-authored article with the host professor at the University of Passau, as well as a pedagogical toolkit.
