This week, our participants thought about the spheres of influence for our campaign and how they might give people in each sphere the opportunity to get involved with their actions. As part of this mission, they also refined the posters they’ve been working on for the past couple weeks! Here’s a graphic that illustrates what we mean by spheres of influence:
Let’s take a look at how some of our squads interpreted this week’s mission!
The Narlugas Are Born
First off, we have a brand new lab: the Narlugas, who are working to create a physical and virtual exhibition of the posters our participants are making, which will help to increase our engagement with the public! In lab founder Laura Holzman’s words:
We’re creating a Free the Vaccine exhibition to tell a story about artistic activism and access to medicines in a way that invites new audiences to harness their own power to promote equity.
We’re envisioning a virtual traveling exhibition with optional physical components that many venues can host at once. Our primary audience is university communities. We want to create space for serious, difficult conversations about how universities can make a big difference in making medicine more affordable and accessible. We’re also providing a more immediate resource: reliable, substantive content that campus galleries can host for free as they navigate new policies related to in-person and virtual programming.
As we try to increase public support for our campaign, the virtual exhibition will help us reach a wider audience and tap into university students and faculty, who have a stake in and leverage over institutional licensing policies.
The Boars Get Animated
The Boars are almost finished with this great video targeting CureVac, which they hope to edit and use for other targets as well! While you won’t understand the video unless you know German, I think you’ll agree that the animation is super adorable and high quality:
I love this action because not only does it have the potential to capture the attention of targets, but it’s a great video to disseminate to the public as well. The team is currently thinking of the best way to share the video with employees at CureVac and other research institutes!
The Bisons Make Connections
We’d like to share the really interesting approach that the Bisons have taken at Indiana University. While many of our squads have made researchers their primary targets, the Bisons have focused on building relationships with the Indiana University library, because they’re already involved with open access efforts, and with the university’s Public Relations department, which is working to promote its COVID-19 research. By building a coalition of support within various branches of the university, they’re thinking more broadly about their circles of influence and the types of groups that can give them leverage in the campaign.
And Now, Posters…
We shared some last week, but we’re excited to share these new visuals coming out of our Labs! We look forward to showing these posters and more to a broad audience once our traveling gallery is established.
