Call for Papers: Communicating through Crisis

Call for Papers

The Communication Geography Specialty Group will be sponsoring a set of sessions at the 2012 AAG meeting on the theme “Communicating through Crisis.” The sessions will provide a means of engaging with the rapidly changing ways in which communication technologies are involved in crisis situations. The recent political uprisings across the Arab world, the earthquakes in New Zealand, and the tsunami in Japan are a few of the crises in the past year that have elicited creative uses of media. From You Tube videos of the tsunami taken with cell phones, to the use of Twitter to organize political protests in Iran, to the use of Facebook to identify looters in Christchurch, to the exchange of videos with trapped miners in Chile, new media are increasingly involved in responding to crisis situations. Novel mixes of media are particularly interesting from a geographical standpoint because they reflect locally-improvised, ad-hoc solutions to impediments in the spatial flow of information and affect. The combination of various kinds of crisis in these sessions will foster cross-fertilization between political geographic approaches and human-environment approaches as both areas address responses to crisis.

Relevant topics of research include the following:

·         Varying functions of local, trans-local and international media in crisis situations

·         Social media as contexts for political mobilization and disaster response

·         Interpersonal media as news-gathering channels and as tools for protecting health and safety

·         Scale jumping via media to resist authoritarian power

·         Creating proximity through media technologies (for example evading distance and language barriers through pictures)

·         News media as a stimulus to the use of social media

·         News media dependency on social media and interpersonal media

·         Multi-media networks emerging on an ad-hoc basis in response to crisis

·         Natural hazards mitigation via heterogeneous media networks

·         Political crisis management via heterogeneous media networks

·         Failures of media and “work-arounds” of such failures in times of crisis

·         Similarities and differences in communications associated with protests versus rescue operations versus international aid mobilization, etc.

·         Uneven distribution of opportunities, risks and communication infrastructure

Submit abstracts and AAG registration code by September 20 to Dr. Paul C. Adams (UT-Austin)

paul.adams@mail.utexas.edu