The use of medicines, dietary supplements, and natural products, to enhance physical, intellectual, and social performance – referred here as performance consumptions – is growing in current societies. It is a complex phenomenon that reflects a change in the conventional use of therapeutic resources, expanding it beyond the realm of health and sickness. This project aims to grasp this modern phenomenon by analyzing performance consumptions within the contexts that spur them. Hence, the focus of analysis – which has commonly been on individual consumption practices - will be redirected towards the social contextuality that structures individuals’ daily lives. The central research object is twofold. Firstly, it concerns practices and dispositions to engage in performance consumptions within specific social contexts. Secondly, it regards their literacy on, and the sources of information used for, different types of consumption. The project focuses on three professional groups associated with contexts of high pressure for performance.The study will be conducted in the urban areas of Lisbon and Oporto. Data collection will follow a mixed methods approach: focus groups, surveys and semi-structured interviews. Additionally, the indicators regarding literacy patterns and information sources, will be replicated to a sample of consumers of performance products, in pharmacies and food supplements stores. This research seeks to respond to several imperatives. It will contribute to further sociological knowledge of a phenomenon with multiple social impacts, on which empirical studies are still scarce. It shall provide a set of indicators on new forms of social demands on labor, which may support policies to promote a social healthier work environments. It operationalizes the issue of literacy in a multidisciplinary perspective, widening scientific perception and the grounds for citizenship on this topic.   Research team:    Noémia Mendes Lopes, PI (CIES-IUL, Egas Moniz CR...

 Therapeutic consumption among youths has been a topic of recent interest in various scientific fields, namely medical, social and political. This interest is focused on the consumption of products to enhance cognitive and body performance to which this generational group is most exposed. Our project falls within this domain and the object of analysis is the trajectories of performance enhancement consumption among youths in Portugal, more specifically on the consumption of the so-called smart drugs and lifestyle drugs. While the former are linked to investments in cognitive performance (enhancing intellectual performance or overcoming natural or neurophysiologic limits), the latter are linked to body performance (investment in growth, muscle development, etc). This spectrum of performance consumption encompasses both pharmaceutical and natural products. The key purpose of our project is to assess the specificity of the emerging youth therapeutic cultures, namely in terms of performance investments (pharmacological and natural), and how these display the blurring of the traditional boundaries between health and illness, between the normal and the pathological. The main analytical objective is to identify the cultural dispositions of youths vis-à-vis these consumptions as well as the role of information networks - notably the internet and everyday sociability contexts - in the production of these dispositions. More information - Final Report available here.        

This research project seeks to analyse and understand one particular aspect of the relationship between technology and society. Our aim is to examine how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are being integrated and used in schools and particularly in the teaching and learning processes in secondary education.

  The aim of the research project that we propose to carry out is to contribute to extending sociological knowledge of the logic(s) and rationalities that embrace the present-day therapeutic pluralism that has spread among the lay universes. In concrete terms, on the basis of actual daily experiences, it is intended to ascertain the criteria that determine the choice between pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapeutic options. In particular, it is to ascertain lay criteria for the credibility of information sources and the criteria for therapeutic effectiveness and risk assessment, which guide the therapeutic practices adopted. As a corollary, it is intended to confer visibility on the social content and constructed nature of the lay knowledges that underpin and "self"-legitimise therapeutic management options.