Cartography of the #MuseusPelaVida campaign actions

Abstract

Faced with the worsening of the pandemic in Brazil in 2021, and the proliferation of fake news, hate speech, denialist and ideological discourses against vaccination and disease prevention measures, the Brazilian committee of the International Council of Museums (ICOM BR) launched the online campaign #MuseusPelaVida, making available on its page a guide with recommendations on ways to approach the topic. Based on this guide, we sought to understand how the recommendations for the campaign were operationalized online by the museums. To do so, we chose the cartography in cyberculture method to think-produce this research on Instagram during the period from the 10th to the 31st of May 2021. As an unfolding of this cartography in cyberculture, we understand that campaigns like #MuseusPelaVida are presented as necessary and fundamental in our time, since we live in a society marked by the politics of hatred and discredit with science. However, we suggest that future online actions of museum activist campaigns go beyond the massive communication model and make use of the premisses and indicators of Online Museum Education to generate active participation of users through conversations that foster collaboration and (co)authorship between museums and their audiences, expanding the social reach and democratization of these institutions.