Contribution short abstract:

Drawing upon theory related to workers’ emotions and care, we discuss how staff from the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência (Lisboa) cared for relationships with visitors, non-visitors, co-workers, and science researchers, and created civic and social commitments amidst the pandemic.

Contribution long abstract:

Jackson (2014) invites us to practice broken world thinking and actively consider how the orders and structures of contemporary societies are cracking and coming apart. In the museum world, Janes (2022) calls on museum communities to confront the spectre of social and environmental collapse. Both perspectives highlight the fragility of the worlds we inhabit – fragilities that the pandemic exacerbated. Scholarly literature and international reports about museums and COVID-19 (e.g., ICOM, 2020; Raved & Yahel, 2022) reveal directions that guided museum work in coping with the crisis. Although the most visible impacts of the pandemic were the interruption of educational activities and the decrease in revenue, responses to this unforeseen event led to renewed social commitments (Morse, 2021) and an awakening to civic life (ICOM, 2020). Moved by these reflections, we wondered how (science) museums responded to this unprecedented crisis and what directions and values guided their work and practice. In this proposal, we focus on a qualitative case study of the Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência (MNHNC; Lisboa, Portugal) and, specifically, on museum professional voices, and documents and artifacts shared by them. Drawing upon theoretical perspectives related to museum workers’ emotions (Morse, 2021; Robinson, 2021) and the notion of care (Morse, 2020; Tronto, 1996; Silverman, 2010) we discuss how MNHNC staff cared for relationships with visitors, non-visitors, co-workers, and science researchers, and created civic and social commitments during and after the pandemic.