Researchers have established the prominent role digital volunteers play during crises and disasters. From self‐organizing to annotating public data, these volunteers are now a fixture in disaster research. However, we know much less about how these volunteers function, behind the public scene, when using private social media as a disaster unfolds and people need to be rescued. This qualitative study identified the emergent helping roles along with the skillsets and abilities that helped volunteers perform these behind‐the‐scene roles during the Hurricane Harvey flooding in 2017. Using in‐depth interviews along with captured images in private social media, we find these volunteers resembled organizational knowledge workers. We identify nine specific communicating and coordinating actions that these disaster knowledge workers performed. The contributions of these findings centre on implications for disaster response and management.
For a short time, we were the best version of ourselves: Hurricane Harvey and the ideal of community
Purpose The authors use a co-auto-ethnographic study of Hurricane Harvey where both authors were citizen responders and disaster researchers. In practice, large-scale disaster helps temporarily foster an ideal of community which is then appropriated by emergency management institutions. The advancement of disaster research must look to more radical perspectives on human response in disaster and what this means for the formation of communities and society itself. It is the collective task as those invested in the management of crises defer to the potentials of publics, rather than disdain and appropriate them. The authors present this work in the advancement of more empirically informed mitigation of societal ills that produce major causes of disaster. The authors’ work presents a departure from the more traditional disaster work into a critical and theoretical realm using novel research methods. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper produces a co-auto-ethnographic study of Hurricane Harvey where both authors were citizen responders and disaster researchers. Findings The authors provide a critical, theoretical argument that citizen-based response fosters an ephemeral utopia not usually experienced in everyday life. Disasters present the possibility of an ideal of community. These phenomena, in part, allow us to live our better selves in the case of citizen response and provide a direct contrast to the modern experience. Modernity is a mostly fabricated, if not almost eradicated sense of community. Modern institutions, serve as sources of domination built on the backs of technology, continuity of infrastructures and self-sufficiency when disasters handicap society, unpredictability breaks illusions of modernity. There arises a need to re-engage with those around us in meaningful and exciting ways. Research limitations/implications This work produces theory rather than engage in testing theory. It is subject to all the limitations of interpretive work that focuses on meaning and critique rather than advancing associations or causality. Practical implications The authors suggest large-scale disasters will persist to overwhelm management institutions no matter how much preparedness and planning occurs. The authors also offer an alternative suggestion to the institutional status quo system based on the research; let the citizenry do what they already do, whereas institutions focus more on mitigate of social ills that lead to disaster. This is particularly urgent given increasing risk of events exacerbated by anthropogenic causes. Social implications The advancement of disaster research must look to more radical perspectives on human response in disaster and what this means for the formation of communities and society itself. It is the collective task as those invested in the management of crises to defer to the potentials of publics, rather than disdain and appropriate them. The authors also suggest that meaningful mitigation of social ills that recognize and emphasize difference will be the only way to manage future large-scale events. Originality/value The authors’ work presents a departure from the more practical utility of disaster work into a critical and highly theoretical realm using novel research methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1760504
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10126439
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Emergency Services
- Volume:
- ahead-of-print
- Issue:
- ahead-of-print
- ISSN:
- 2047-0894
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract -
This paper is based on the analysis of data collected as part of a research conducted through National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 1760504 – RAPID: Disaster Preparedness and Response within Communities Affected by Hurricane Harvey. Our co-autoethnographic study focused on response and short-term recovery in Hurricane Harvey. It consisted of in-depth interviews conducted with emergency management officials, first responders, members of non-governmental organizations, civic leaders, spontaneous volunteers, and flooding victims coupled with an analysis of Crowdsource (spontaneously created virtual platform for citizens’ response) data. Our results point to the phenomenon of unstrapping identified across standard operating procedures, organizational arrangements, formal communication flows, formal emergency management processes, and resource utilization protocols. While unstrapping has been evidenced in our study to be perceived as threatening by emergency management and response entities, we adapt a complexity-informed worldview to propose unstrapping representing natural processes inherent to complex adaptive systems. Our study highlights unpredictability and change in human and organizational systems and give rise to self-organization, self-regulation that ultimately gives rise to resilience and adaptability. Implications for emergency management and policy are discussed.more » « less
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Abstract Natural disasters affect thousands of communities every year, leaving behind human losses, billions of dollars in rebuilding efforts, and psychological affectation in survivors. How fast a community recovers from a disaster or even how well a community can mitigate risk from disasters depends on how resilient that community is. One main factor that influences communities' resilience is how a community comes together in times of need. Social cohesion is considered to be“the glue that holds society together, which can be better examined in a critical situation. There is no consensus on measuring social cohesion, but recent literature indicates that social media communications and communities play an essential role in today's disaster mitigation strategies.This research explores how to quantify social cohesion through social media outlets during disasters. The approach involves combining and implementing text processing techniques and graph network analysis to understand the relationships between nine different types of participants during hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. Visualizations are employed to illustrate these connections, their evolution before, during, and after disasters, and the degree of social cohesion throughout their timeline. The proposed measurement of social cohesion through social media networks presented in this work can provide future risk management and disaster mitigation policies. This social cohesion measure identifies the types of actors in a social network and how this network varies daily. Therefore, decisionmakers could use this measure to release strategic communication before, during, and after a disaster strikes, thus providing relevant information to people in need.
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Concept maps have emerged as a valid and reliable method for assessing deep conceptual understanding in engineering education within disciplines as well as interdisciplinary knowledge integration across disciplines. Most work on concept maps, however, focuses on undergraduates. In this paper, we use concept maps to examine changes in graduate students’ conceptual understanding and knowledge integration resulting from an interdisciplinary graduate program. Our study context is pair of foundational, team-taught courses in an interdisciplinary Disaster Resilience and Risk Management (DRRM) graduate program. The courses include a 3-hour research course and a 1-hour seminar that aim to build student understanding within and across Urban Affairs and Planning, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Geosciences, and Business Information Technology. The courses introduce core principles of DRRM and relevant research methods in these disciplines, and drive students to understand the intersections of these disciplines in the context of planning for and responding to natural and human-made disasters. To understand graduate student growth from disciplinary-based to interdisciplinary scholars, we pose the research questions: 1) In what ways do graduate students’ understandings of DRRM change as a result of their introduction to an interdisciplinary graduate research program? and 2) To what extent and in what ways do concept maps serve as a tool to capture interdisciplinary learning in this context? Data includes pre/post concept maps centered on disaster resilience and risk management, a one-page explanation of the post-concept map, and ethnographic field notes gathered from class and faculty meetings. Pre-concept maps were collected on the first day of class; post-concept maps will be collected as part of the final course assignment. We assess the students’ concept maps for depth of conceptual understanding within disciplines and interdisciplinary competency across disciplines, using the field notes to provide explanatory context. The results presented in this paper support the inclusion of an explanation component to concept maps, and also suggest that concept maps alone may not be the best measure of student understanding of concepts within and across disciplines in this specific context. If similar programs wish to use concept maps as an assessment method, we suggest the inclusion of an explanation component and suggest providing explicit instructions that specify the intended audience. We also suggest using a holistic scoring method, as it is more likely to capture nuances in the concept maps than traditional scoring methods, which focus solely on counting factors like hierarchies and number of cross-links.more » « less
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Widespread disasters can overload official agencies’ capacity to provide assistance, and often citizen-led groups emerge to assist with disaster response. As social media platforms have expanded, emergent rescue groups have many ways to harness network and mobile tools to coordinate actions and help fellow citizens. This study used semi-structured interviews and photo elicitation techniques to better understand how wide-scale rescues occurred during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooding in the Greater Houston, Texas USA area. We found that citizens used diverse apps and social media-related platforms during these rescues and that they played one of three roles: rescuer, dispatcher, or information compiler. The key social media coordination challenges these rescuers faced were incomplete feedback loops, unclear prioritization, and communication overload. This work-in-progress paper contributes to the field of crisis and disaster response research by sharing the nuances in how citizens use social media to respond to calls for help from flooding victims.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1108/IJES-12-2018-0066
