Volume 9 • Issue 2 • 2026

In the context of the widespread reach of platforms such as YouTube, we study how identity-related issues shape the relationship between content creators and audiences, contributing to either the expansion or limitation of engagement with science-related videos published on Brazilian YouTube. To this end, we examine the argument that gender, race, and age are key factors structuring the dynamics of visibility, recognition, power, and the circulation of meaning. Our corpus consisted of 134 videos published on Brazilian YouTube. The findings show that identity functions as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion in occupying positions of influence on platforms such as YouTube.

This article presents TUCANO (an acronym derived from the Portuguese for: Unified Techniques for the Categorization and Analysis of Online News), a hybrid methodological protocol for the analysis of online news corpora in Portuguese. Developed to address a challenge posed by non-probability sampling in Social Sciences, TUCANO seeks to delimit, organize, and explore sets of news articles without losing the interpretive depth of qualitative analysis. The protocol combines Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, such as tokenization, vectorization, and co-occurrence analysis, with a theoretical rationale oriented toward corpus construction and thematic subsampling. Its workflow is organized into six stages, ranging from the formulation of the guiding question to the definition of well-grounded subsets for qualitative analysis. Its applicability is demonstrated through a study on media coverage of the use of plastic straws and their impacts on marine life. With a lightweight, transparent, and accessible computational infrastructure, TUCANO enhances qualitative analysis and expands the critical use of computational tools in the Applied Social Sciences.

This study analyzed the perceptions of residents of São Carlos, São Paulo, Brazil, regarding the city’s public universities. A total of 454 participants took part in the study, including local community residents and students from public and private high schools. The quantitative investigation was based on a previous qualitative study and addressed five dimensions: comparison between public and private higher education institutions, learning environment, benefits to the city, the university as a social right, and idealized views of the university. The results indicated predominantly positive perceptions of public universities, but also revealed differences among the groups investigated and gaps in their understanding of the universities’ teaching, research, and extension functions. The findings highlight the need to strengthen communication and engagement between universities and society in order to foster a more comprehensive understanding of the social role of public higher education institutions.

 

Recycling detectives is an intergenerational educational activity offered by the children’s area at Universum, the Science Museum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), designed to teach children and their families about the recycling process for Tetra Pak® containers. This text describes the pedagogical criteria that guided its design and presents the results of a formative evaluation based on direct observation to analyze interactions, emotions, and knowledge gained during the experience. The findings show that play, as a legitimate form of learning, facilitates intergenerational cooperation, stimulates emotions, and promotes environmental thinking from an early age.