Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro

The Directing Actors course explores the well-known research fields of performance, gender, and star studies, in order to understand how a relationship between people, mediated by a camera, in different positions, is realized, adopting equally distinct procedures to achieve previously prepared results. Within this perspective, the aim is not to adopt a single method, sufficiently capable of encompassing countless possibilities, but to recognize the breadth of paths and tools available to direct people with significant, none, or insufficient professional experience.

The course addresses a selected collection of themes that are crucial for the creation and development of a startup, among which one can find group behavior and performance, leadership, motivation, and interpersonal influence, storytelling, gamification and design thinking. Through a series of interactive classes, lectures and exercises, students develop competencies in organizational design, human resources management, leadership, and organizational behavior in the context of an internal or external new venture.

This course is an opportunity to watch, discuss, understand, evaluate, and develop audiovisual narratives around brands. This course entices students to amplify their vision of the advertising film industry, its history, current best practices, and new challenges. From the 30/60-seconds-ads to the social media video content, students work on the storytelling behind campaigns and have the opportunity to produce audiovisual ads for clients chosen by the students. This course covers advertising and cinematographic language; creation, production and evaluations of advertising films; format and content transformations along history; and current audiovisual advertising practices.

The course looks at the different facets of international conflict mediation, with an emphasis on the treatment of armed conflict. In the first part of the course, the course locates the debate on mediation within the scope of Peace and Conflict Studies, especially on the concepts of conflict management, resolution, and transformation; as well as the concepts of peacekeeping, peacemaking, and peacebuilding. The course highlights the particularities of mediation in relation to other mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of disputes, in particular negotiation, exploring the construction of the debate on mediation in the Conflict Resolution literature and its main associated concepts. From this movement, the course covers what mediation is; who are the people or organizations who act as mediators; when mediation should be introduced to deal with conflicts; and how, and through which mechanisms and tools, mediation is exercised. As an important part of this debate, the course discusses the creation and consolidation of norms around mediation at the international level, particularly in the context of UN and regional organizations. In the second part of the course, students study cases, themes, and state-of-the-art discussions on international mediation, including, for example, the mediation of ceasefires and DDR processes; local knowledge and methods of mediation, decolonial critiques and voices from the Global South; debates on international mediation, gender, and race; and mediation in cases of conflicts and environmental crimes. The classes are structured in two parts: in the first half, debates on theoretical and conceptual issues based on the selected bibliography; in the second part, seeking to understand the content of the first part of the class in the light of activities anchored in practical cases, official documents, peace agreements, technical publications from organizations and research centers dedicated to mediation, etc. 

The objective of this course is to carry out an updated reading of certain classic texts of the socialist tradition in order to discuss the relationship between the Political and the Economic, and from there, between a Politics overdetermined by class and a postmodern Politics centered on identity and subjective elements. This course explores Rousseau, the thought of the utopian socialists and their Marxist critique, the evolution of Marx and Engels' political thought from 1848, the Paris Commune, Evolutionism and reformism in the Marxism of the Second International, the Luxembourgist critique, Lenin and the emergence of Bolshevism, Gramsci, and the radicalization of Leninism by Trotsky. This course also includes contemporary assessments of these topics.

This course offers an in-depth discussion of key topics in the history of Brazilian art and its relation to other cultural spheres such as architecture, literature, and popular music. It examines the trajectory of avant-gardism in Brazil, starting with its consolidation in 1920s debates apropos of notions such as futurism, modernismo and
anthropophagy; its constructivist inflection in the 1950s, with the appearance of Museums of Modern Art and the São Paulo Biennial and provisional cultural alliances with cosmopolitan sectors of an emergent urban bourgeoisie; the growing social and political tensions that marked the resurgence of figuration in the 1960s and the
development of what artist Hélio Oiticica called his “environmental program”; and finally the dispersion of the avant-garde during the harshest years of the military regime and the rise of new experimental tendencies by Brazilian artists who either remained in the country or took exile abroad in the 1970s. The course also discusses the broader background of modernism in Brazil (as opposed to the narrower sphere of the avant-garde) and developments in the fields of architecture (such as the construction of Brasília) and popular music (such as musical Tropicalism) that proved impactful also to visual artists. Throughout the course, students investigate the issue of nationalism x internationalism in the arts, highlighting different strategies of critical assimilation of international tendencies by Brazilian artists and critics.
The course includes not only classroom lectures and discussion seminars, but also occasional visits to museums and architectural landmarks in Rio de Janeiro.

This course covers concepts and approaches to environmental ethics, including environmental ethics in the philosophical rationalities of Western culture, environmental ethics in traditional cultures, environmental ethics and biodiversity, environmental ethics and spirituality, environmental ethics and the major socio-environmental challenges of the national and international community, ethics and environmental education, and experiences in the construction of ethical-environmental values ​​in the processes of training multiplier agents in local communities.