“Direct expression does not dream.

Do not use the common stroke.

An artist’s strength comes from defeats.

Only a tormented soul can voice

the shape of a bird …

The eye sees, the memory, re-sees, and the imagination sees through,

It is necessary to see through the world.

(Manuel de Barros)

In a political and educational conjuncture marked by uncertainty and complexity, driven by different media and technological possibilities, in times of digital culture, to place the triad of images, medias and corporal practices on the agenda has been a singular challenge.

The announcement of the dossier, along with the autonomy of the invited writers, inspired perspectives about public policies, imagetic productions, educational technologies, reflections about cyberspace, re-readings of corporal cultures, and other themes, generating in the authorship of this edition of the journal an expectation for the socialization of international and Brazilian studies, in harmony with education and citizenship. And considering citizenship in a context in which basic rights are being threatened requires a constant articulation between the different fields of knowledge constructed in educational and investigative actions.

The need to explore new frontiers of education and communication to act in this reality increasingly involves multiple, plural and interdisciplinary perspectives that act from an inter- and transdisciplinary perspective, traveling through different territories, practices and narratives, to be able to “see through the world” as affirmed in the epigraph by Manuel de Barros.

Inspired in the poetic of this non-linear opportunity to consider education and research, we seek out pedagogical reflections and praxes in which images permeate bodies and media – that challenge us to better understand the different processes, ties and articulations that connect image and education in teaching and learning processes in the contemporary world. These interfaces and nuances involve epistemological, philosophical and pedagogical approaches to the triad image, media and technology, and to experiences focused on corporal practices – understood through corporality as enunciative possibilities, with a focus on education and the opportunity for construction of knowledge about the self, the other and the world. These images, practices and knowledges that are needed today intersect by and with digital culture.

While in the 1960s ^{McLuhan (2007}, p. 33) said that electrical technology passed through walls, and that we are insensitive, deaf, blind and mute before its confrontation with the technology of Guttenberg, for Han (2017, p. 11), the same is true today for digital technology, because we are once again “programmed by its medias” without perceiving the radical change of paradigm. In the digital wake, “in a conscious decision, our behavior, perceptions, sensations, thought, and forms of conviviality change completely”. Han affirms that “we inebriate ourselves with digital technology, while we are incapable of completely evaluating the consequences of our inebriation. It is this simultaneous blindness and obnubilation that accompany what defines the current crisis”.

It is essential to think of the challenges of education and communication in this period that is permeated by tensions and intolerances, which are part of this “digital swarm”, as Han (2017) affirms, formed both by isolated individuals who lack the sense of “us” that allows common action, and by other silent or noisy collectives. For Han, “digital hyper-communication destroys the silence [of] what the soul needs to reflect and to be itself”, because “we hear only the noise without meaning and coherence”, and “all this precludes the formation of countervailing power that could call into question the established order” (^{HAN, 2016} back cover).

Nevertheless, this opposing power is also constructed in the communication constituted by non-verbal forms, gestures, facial expressions, corporal language and in forms that confer a tactile character to modes of communicating. And, given the plurality of dimensions and levels of human perception – which is not reduced to the visual, but requests the participation of other senses – at times, digital media can both remove and intensify their corporal and tactile power. After all, to touch a screen with one’s finger tips is an action that transforms our relationship with the other, because it eliminates the distance that constitutes the other in its alterity. As ^{Han (2016}, p. 36) affirms: “we can touch the image, touch it directly [...]. By touching with the fingertips, the other is available to me. We distance the other with the fingertips, causing to appear in his place our own reflected image”.

This possibility to remove and or approximate the other with the finger tips is something very powerful, an action that deserves special attention. For ^{Arendt (1997)}, action is understood as the capacity to “initiate”, to begin something different, and she sees each birth or each child that carries the promise of a new beginning as an opportunity for action. But, when this action is in a certain way conditioned on automatic processes, what happens to our “freedom of action”?

By asking who we are and what type of relationship we establish with each other, the philosopher Luciano ^{Floridi (2017)} affirms that we are living through a fourth revolution, in which the infosphere is transforming the world, because developments in the fields of technology, information and communication have modified our responses to fundamental questions, the way that we relate with others and the way that we give form and meaning to our world, interacting with it. For Floridi, nanotechnology, the internet of things, web 2.0, the semantic web, cloud computing, games based on registers of body movements, applications for smartphones, tablets and touch screens, GPS, augmented reality, drones, “artificial friends and companions” self-driving cars, wearable computing devices, 3D printers, stolen identities, data control, online courses, social media, cyber-wars and others lead both technophiles and technophobes to ask: what comes next? And the author asks: what is behind all of this? Is there any opportunity to interpret these phenomena as an aspect of a single trend?

Part of the difficulty in obtaining these responses resides in the fact that we consider technologies as instruments through which we interact with the world and among ourselves. For Floridi, the technologies “become environmental, anthropological and interpretable forces. They create and forge our physical and intellectual reality, modify our understanding of ourselves, change how we relate with each other and with ourselves, revising our interpretation of the world (^{FLORIDI, 2017}, p. IX).

They do all this in a diffuse, deep and incessant manner, so that the tenuous frontier between life on and offline tends to disappear, because we are increasingly and progressively connected, becoming part of a “global infosphere”. This passage from one epoch to another, according to Floridi, represents a fourth revolution.

If the online universe has increasingly defined our daily activities (relations, work, leisure), we perceive that, in each realm of life, communication technologies are becoming structural forces of the various environments in which we live, transforming reality. But are we capable of reaping their fruits? And what are they? The emancipation and empowerment of the subject? Or, to the contrary, are we more vulnerable and living with various implicit or explicit risks? It appears to us that given these dilemmas it is important to develop an approach that can perceive both the possibilities of the both the natural reality and of the artificial, to be able to confront challenges raised by the current technologies, particularly through education.

The profusion of images in a wide variety of forms, the intensity of the (self) exhibition in the media, the generalized distraction, the volatility of relations and movements, the constant proliferation of information, at times makes reflection difficult, but simultaneously reveals a potential for other perspectives and for research and education. In this sense, ^{Flusser (2008)} recognizes two trends based on current technical images: one that indicates the direction of totalitarian societies, which are centrally programmed and formed by receptors of images; and another that indicates the path of a telematic society, which has dialogs between creators and collectors of images. Although we can discuss and question these forms, for Flusser “what we can no longer question is the mastery of technical images in future society ... thus it is nearly certain that technical images will concentrate existential interests of future men” (^{FLUSSER, 2008}, p. 13).

By placing images and artifacts at the center of contemporary existence ^{Flusser (2007}, p. 153) discusses images in the new media and how the production of incorporeal images is transcoded, given that “images become increasingly transportable and receptors increasingly more immobile, that is, the political space becomes increasingly more superfluous”. For Flusser, this trend is characteristic of the “cultural revolution of current times. All messages (information) can be copied and broadcast by immobile receptors. This actually involves a cultural revolution, and not only a new technology” (^{FLUSSER, 2007}, p. 153). In the way that they now function, the new media transform images into “models of behavior and make men mere objects. But the media can function in a different way, transforming images into carriers and men into designers of meanings” (^{FLUSSER, 2007}, p. 159).

Thus, on one hand, we find messages, images and information at times do not inform and come to deform. Forms of communication fail to communicate and come to “provoke”. Time is dispersed in a series of present [moments], with a “probable loss of sight of future horizons and of social memories of the past” (^{PAIS, 2017}, p.306). We have a society of transparency, yet one which also establishes a society of vigilance and control. And, on the other hand, we have a connective intelligence, networks and spaces of affinity that can be powerful spaces of digital learning and promote changes in education, as Gee (2013) affirms.

By criticizing what he calls “anti-education”, ^{Gee (2013)} clarifies that the current culture and educational approaches fail to make us more intelligent and offer outdated ideas about what we can do. And, Gee affirms, social media can contribute more to this generation of students, if educators and parents maximize their positive effects inside and outside classrooms. Digital learning and social media could help teach how to resolve global challenges, and connective and synchronized intelligences could provide an important strategy for overcoming current limitations of schools.

In fact, the rapid diffusion of digital and social media and mobile devices has radically transformed our environment, although in a context of inequalities and exclusions, as we find in Brazil, because, with portability, the digital media “migrate to within our lives”, but they are not always present in schools and in teaching and learning processes. The same is true of collaborative learning, because, when one speaks of “group technology” or “community technology” (^{RIVOLTELLA, 2017}) in reference to decreasing distances and opportunities to establish a participative and convergent culture, we know that these qualities are not always part of or are properly problematized in education and research.

It is in light of these various scenarios, provocations and disturbances that the Dossier Images, Medias and Corporal Practices intends to contribute by presenting educational and cultural reflections and practices based on different fields and approaches, in search of possible dialogs. In this way, we do not intend to propose solutions to the various problems identified, but to critically question certain trends.

Among so many sophisticated and basic questions about the contemporary situation, the contribution and originality of the texts in this dossier stand out for the unique nature of the articulations they create between themes and authors from different fields of knowledge – including the arts, communication, education, physical education, philosophy and sociology – to consider the challenges described above in an interdisciplinary manner. In addition, the insufficient discussion of this theme in our country reveals the need to expand dialogs about the issue, particularly when these crucial questions about media, society and education are challenged by fake news and political programs that compromise conquests of quality public education for all.

With this purpose, this dossier has two sections that are articulated around the substantive theoretical categories – image, media and body – addressed by the eight texts, five by Brazilian authors, and three by foreign authors.

In the article Il corpo-ambiente virtuale, [The vitual environment-body], philosopher Roberto Diodato (USCS/Italy) discusses how the mediatized “world of life” is understood as a hypermediatic environment or a means, a device inhabited by digital neotechnology, which makes the fabric of the world a communicative fabric. For Diodato, in this fabric, the virtual environment-body is characterized as a new, immersive and interactive being, which is ontologically hybrid, because it is simultaneously internal and external, thing and image. Using concepts from Husserl, Manovich, Foucault, Queau, Grusin and others, the author discusses interfaces beyond screens. By thinking of the relation between touching and imagining, Diodato affirms that what is touched are images that result from a process of digitalization. These are tactile, oneiric, sonorous, smellable and tastable images. And when he discusses the ontological novelty of the virtual, the “virtual body” must be understood not as a representation of reality, but as a reality constructed in a different way from that constituted by the circular participation of the living body in the world, which, thanks to vision-perception, permeates, becomes gesture and movement eventually mediated by instruments of analogical reproduction and therefore image. By relating art and virtuality, Diodato discusses works of art in the era of virtual devices and their interactive nature as forms of contingent and collective experience in which body and work become mediatic space.

To continue the reflection about images, the text of Valeska Fortes Oliveira (UFSM), Imaginário, mídias e formação: o que pode o professor no espaço universitário? [Imaginary, medias and education: what can a professor do in university space?] discusses the medias with references from the field of the social imaginary, based on media inventions and relations created with them. The empiric focus of the reflection involves university professors and their relations with media and images based on challenges raised by students, above all by the evident change from passive bodies to connected bodies. With the audiovisual languages of the electronic medias, in university spaces, bodies were modified by corporality and by the ways that these media communicate and inform, above all when these bodies of students and teachers meet in university classes. Based on Serres, Machado and Castoriadis, the article discusses the idea of creation, emphasizing the symbolic beings that we are, not only as inheritors of traditions, of historic-social projects and of meta-narratives designed in other historic moments, but as producers of meanings that we establish. Using a biographic focus in which professors reflect on the knowledge and productions that they construct through teaching based on the use of technologies, the author emphasizes the importance of asking “what meaning do professors give to the use of social networks for learning?” “What relationship do we have with social networks?” “How can we produce experiences capable of moving students and ourselves to other movements, other thinking and actions in society?” By presenting statements and accounts from university professors, the author reflects on challenges to learning and forms of resignification of their practices in the field of the social imaginary, in order to think of other possibilities for being a professor and living in the culture of the medias.

Considerations about bodies and images in different spaces can be enriched with the text

Fotografias em Instagram: imagens de práticas corporais e sociabilidades em parques públicos citadinos de lazer, [Photographs on Instagram: images of corporal practices and sociabilities in urban public parks] by Augusto Cesar Rios Leiro (UFBA/UNEB), Ednaldo Pereira Filho (Unisinos) and Paulo Carvalho Lima (UFBA). The authors analyze human sociabilities by examining images found on Instagram of corporal practices in urban public parks. Based on an exploratory study of a quantitative and qualitative nature, the authors reflect on the images captured on Instagram using search engines and geolocalization tools to find photos taken in two public parks in Brazilian metropolitan regions. The images of sociabilities on the internet express aspects of singularity of daily life, as well as its spectacularization. The authors find that by posting the pictures individuals produce social relations mediated by images, and when the issue is human sociability, the real and virtual spaces are not constituted as distinct environments. As theoretical foundations, the authors discuss the images in daily life using ideas from Debord, as well as the notion of intimacy as spectacle as suggested by Sibilia, the idea of corporal practices as cultural phenomenon from Lazarotti, the sociability found in Simmel, photography as language and device in Joly, and the emphasis on public parks as space-times for encounter of subjects proposed by Leiro. The methodological path offers a detailed work of selection and analysis of images that pass through Instagram. Between written and imagetic texts, having the challenge of the narratives and their interlocutions as the focus of the possible interpretations, the article concludes with instigating provocations to our feeling and thinking about corporal practices and images from the parks and on the networks.

Meanwhile, the article Os selfies e o corpo tombamento: reflexões a partir de uma autoimagem sonora [Selfies, and the entombed body: reflections on a sonorous self-image], by Edméa Santos and Carina D’Avila (UERJ), reflects on an experiment that was part of a research-education project with students in a course on Photography and Handling of Images, in the class “Olhar” [Look], conducted at the Escola de Arte e Tecnologia Spectaculu, in Rio de Janeiro. With the objective of giving potential to aesthetic experience, the research-education methodology used was inspired by Barbier, Nóvoa, Macedo and Josso and revised by Santos, and focused on the educational experience of those involved as a condition for the production of new knowledge. The project analyzed began with a device used in the classroom called “ Musical Self Portrait” – a self-image linked to a song. It involved designing oneself, writing about one’s educational networks, speaking about oneself, listening to the other, and the creation and production of a sonorous self-image. Using music, images, visualities and postings, the text invites us to use certain apps found in cyberspace, understanding that educational networks are essential to digital culture and that the uses of new digital technologies in network can approximate subjects. Considering narratives of the self and the other, singularities and differences, bodies and self-portraits, selfies and nudes, images and listenings, the authors discuss the different aesthetics permeated by notions of presence and meaning (Gombrech) related to the concept of entombment. In this article this concept is understood as an ethical-aesthetic manifesto, present in bodies of a youth educated in and with the periphery and on the internet, which creates other narratives and spaces of action, above all in relation to black identity. Here multi-references are used to interpret various points of view and the “exuberance, abundance, wealth of social practices”. Finally, in the “(in)conclusions”, the aesthetic experience, the resistance of the bodies and the processes of discovery, creation and reinvention of the self appear as aspects indispensable to educational experience and formative research.

The relationship between media, body and society transcends frontiers, and Portuguese researcher Isabel Freire (Universidade Lisboa) analyzes some aspects of this relation in the article Cidadania da sexualidade na imprensa portuguesa do pós-revolução dos Cravos [Citizenship of Sexuality in the Portuguese Press after the Carnation Revolution]. The author analyzes the content of magazines and journals published between 1968 and 1978, a period of euphoria after the Revolution of April 25, 1974, to contribute to the debate about social changes in sexual-emotional experiences during the transition from dictatorship to democracy in Portugal. The article begins with an analysis of articles that associate political liberty to sexual liberty, and that consider intimate experiences as a public issue and one of citizenship. In a certain way, these articles mark the media agenda after the Carnation Revolution. Examples include the publication of a letter in which an adolescent narrates her personal sexual history, which she had sent to a woman’s magazine; the first Portuguese homosexual manifesto, published in the press two weeks after the Revolution dos Cravos; and an article about a document signed by 500 prostitutes demanding social and political rights, which was discussed at a meeting of the feminist Democratic Movement of Women. Considering the transition from dictatorship and censorship to democracy and discussion, and the distinction between private and public life, the article examines various narratives, documents, books, songs, poetry, and articles about themes of sexual-emotional intimacy in Portuguese society. Among different terms that express certain transformations, the author highlights some that have lasted more than five decades: sexual revolution, emancipation of women, sexual liberty and others that are analyzed with concepts from Foucault. The concept of intimate citizenship is used to consider decisions about control over the body, feelings and relationships, as well as choices about identities, experiences of gender and erotic experiences. Among interrogations about life histories and autobiographies, the author highlights the pedagogic dimension of these narratives and the need for the human and social sciences to pay more attention to the forms of telling these histories in different communication media, in the new public spheres – programs in auditoriums, talk shows, home movies, personal blogs – and on social networks, calling attention to the discourses of citizenship of sexuality that reveal belonging or exclusion and can also produce new narratives of resistance.

In the article Mídia, corpo e mercado: (im)possibilidades formativas diante do poder simbólico [Media, body and market: formative (im)possibilities in the face of symbolic power], Cristiano Mezzaroba and Sergio Dorenksi (UFS) weave a critical reflection about the cult of the “perfect body” presented in the media based on image and discourse, inferring how symbolic power acts on subjectivities, creating a market and demands for personalized products. Based on an immersion in academic studies related to this theme, the text uses concepts from authors such as Adorno and Horkheimer; Bourdieu; Orozco; and Martin-Barbero to discuss the cultural industry, symbolic power and mediations. As a counterpoint to the media discourses, the authors indicate the possibility for confrontation, by means of human formation, specifically cultural education that takes places in school mediations (Freire, Macedo, Nóvoa). Based on a critical reading of the mechanisms that construct representations of bodies in contemporary times, the article understands the body in a web that intertwines biological, psychic-emotional, social, political and cultural elements. The authors discuss the symbolic power of the media appeal of the “body-market” by considering discourses about “healthy-life”, scientific knowledge and the symbolic power of media. They examine what they call “dictatorships of beauty”, “dictatorships of the body” and “dictatorships of fashion” and their aesthetics, as promoted in a wide variety of media productions that people confront daily in the digital culture as they search for what the authors consider the myth of physical activity and health. The article exemplifies these aspects in different situations of cultural consumption and in the analysis of studies about the body and media discourse, highlighting the importance of education and particularly of media-education.

Given the importance of considering educational practices based on experiences and studies that address the theme of this dossier as it relates to childhood, the article Cenários de pesquisa com e sobre crianças, mídia, imagens e corporeidade [Research situations with and about children, media, images and corporality], by Monica Fantin and Gilka Giradello (UFSC), reflects on the relationship between media, images and corporalities in research with and about children from the perspective of education. Based on the plurality of cultural scenes and practices of contemporary childhoods, the authors locate theoretical and methodological foundations that have guided investigations in Brazilian and international contexts. Based on an understanding of research as a space of critical reflection and a pedagogical process, the investigations discussed in the article link the themes of media, image and corporality, highlighting the rights of children and play, to children’s authorship and challenges to educational practices in digital culture. By situating the themes and approaches discussed in the studies with and about children from a media-education perspective, the authors call attention to new methods for investigating new media and cultural practices, to the diversity of their textual forms, analysis and production, and new teaching and research methodologies. In a transversal methodological and thematic universe, the article observes the importance that sociological studies, childhood studies, cultural studies, studies of multi-literacies and other branches of knowledge contribute to the methodologies. They consider ethical questions involved in researching the relationship between children, images, media, internet and social networks, in and outside schools, as well as modes of participation in culture. Finally, the text indicates some research trends, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary articulation between researchers who work with these themes, to qualify educational mediation in the context of contemporary cultural changes.

In the epilog of this instigating dossier, the article Towards a cultural history of digital autodidacticism – changing cultural narratives of education, [Por uma história cultural do autodidatismo digital – mudanças nas narrativas culturais da educação], by English professor Julian Sefton-Green (Deakin University, Austrália), discusses aspects of supposedly new learning phenomenon found in digital culture, but that have their roots in traditional forms of learning. By examining new imaginaries of students today, who are “connected, creative, autonomous, coding, motivated and make digital learning”, the author locates these roots in various visions, that come from different educational systems, tracing historic aspects of ancient imaginaries of autodidacticism and of theoretical approaches to contemporary learning. These include Connectivism (Siemens), the Theory of Connected Learning (Ito et al.) and participation in communities of practice or in peer or affinity groups (Gee). In this way, Sefton-Green articulates the formal and informal realms of knowledge, which at times are understood in the relationship between self-learning and self-teaching. The author also analyzes how both these processes incorporate and revise the visions of “new learner of tomorrow”, emphasizing cultural history as a means to understand the digital. By highlighting artisanal practices, coding and experience, the article highlights an “emotional disjuncture” between the valorization of certain abilities considered “slow” and others, associated to the “contemporary hipster”, which is a reference to a fast, automated and impersonal aesthetic, related to the digital culture. The author exemplifies opportunities to interlace digital culture with the interests of artisanal learning, and its affiliations and disconnections with the digital act, to reconceptualize the nature of learning in the digital era, given that the “apprentice” or student of these artisanal-digital cultures is very different from the subjects produced by the modern school.

Finally, after this panoramic synthesis of the articles, we can let each text speak for itself. These opening words are an invitation to engage in unique readings and interpretations that inspire new reflections on images, medias and corporal practices that we hope will instigate new writings.