A legitimação da UFSM diante da pandemia da Covid-19: análise da comunicação institucional da universidade a partir do portal www.ufsm.br/coronavirus

Abstract

This work has as its theme the legitimation of institutions through communication. Its thematic is delimited by university communication in a mediatized and political scenario, enhanced by the Covid-19 pandemic, which stresses its social legitimacy. The general objective is to analyze how the Federal University of Santa Maria organize its communication and provide its visibility and legitimation, through the portal www.ufsm.br/coronavirus . It is an exploratory investigation, which adds originality to the research and qualifies an area of communication at an integrated pace, between academia and the market. A qualitative approach method and bibliographic and documentary research techniques are used. The corpus consists of materialities that represent actions of institutional communication at UFSM, identified from the aforementioned portal, carried out between March and December 2020. The main concepts of this research are: a) mediatization, having as main references Hjarvard (2012), Sodré (2002), Barichello (2014) and Fausto Neto (2008); b) legitimation, dealt with Berger and Luckmann (1985) and Barichello (2001, 2004) and c) Public Relations, especially strategic communication, addressed by Bueno (2009) and Kunsch (2003). After investigating how actions developed by UFSM communication in the year 2020, it was found, as final considerations, that there was an agile and strategic action by the area to organize the www.ufsm.br/coronavirus portal and constantly update it. Thus, it was concluded that, in the pandemic, the communication adopted by UFSM provided continuous visibility for the actions developed by the Institution, integrating the sectors in an ecosystem, making it possible to legitimize the University as an agent of public interest.