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New Media in Times of Crisis

an interdisciplinary look at research focused around how people organize during crises | let’s meet the authors of New Media in Times of Crisis:

Chapter 1 Title: Organizational Crisis Communication in the Age of Social Media:Weaving a Practitioner Perspective Into Theoretical Understanding

Ashley Barrett, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in Health and Organizational Communication at Baylor University. Her research explores how organizations use new technology to communicate with their employees and other stakeholders during times of high uncertainty and high risk. Her work has been published in Management Communication Quarterly, Health Communication, Human Communication Research, and Information People & Technology.

Cindy Posey, MA, is Director of Internal Communications, and the former Director of Internal and Campus Safety Communications and Public Information Officer, at The University of Texas at Austin. She has over 30 years of experience in organizational and crisis communication, has taught as an adjunct instructor at the University of Central Florida and Southwestern University, and is a certified executive coach.

Chapter 2 Title: This is Getting Bad: Embodied Sensemaking About Hazards When Business-as-Usual Turns into an Emergency

Jody L. S. Jahn (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is an Assistant Professor at University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research uses mixed methods to examine how members of hazardous organizations communicate to negotiate action, and how members interface with organizational safety policies and documents. Recent research examines wildland firefighting workgroups. Her research appears in Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Communication Monographs,and other journals.

Chapter 3 Title: The Cultivation of Shared Resources for Crisis Response in Multiteam Systems

Elizabeth A. Williams (PhD, Purdue University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Colorado State University. Her research and teaching is at the intersection of organizational and health communication research. She is interested in how multiteam systems and high reliability organizations learn and recover from failures and how those processes influence the health and safety of organizational members.

Chapter 4 Title: Identifying Communicative Processes Influencing Risk-Information Seeking at Work: A Research Agenda

Jessica Ford is an assistant professor of Health Communication at Baylor University. Her research examines organizational disruptions that affect the health and safety of organizational members. Dr. Ford’s research often investigates the implications of technology use during emergency events, such as evacuations, school shootings, and workplace injuries.

Chapter 5 Title: Mobile Crisis Communication: Temporality, Rhetoric, and the Case of Wireless Emergency Alerts

Hamilton Bean, Ph.D., MBA, APR, is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver, where he conducts research at the intersection of communication, organization, and security. Since 2005, he has been affiliated with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence.

Stephanie Madden, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Memphis. Her research explores the intersections among public
relations, activism, risk/crisis communication, and social media. Previously, Dr. Madden was a full-time communication researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a U.S. Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence.

Chapter 6 Title: Transportation Network Issues in Evacuations

Tarun Rambha is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru. He conducts research in transportation network modeling and optimization.

Ehsan Jafari is currently a senior system engineer at Optym, and contributed to this chapter while a doctoral student at The University of Texas at Austin.

Stephen Boyles is an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin.

Chapter 7: Trouble at 30,000 feet: Twitter response to United Airlines’ PR crises

Michael A. Cacciatore (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations in Grady College at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on media coverage of and opinion formation for science and risk topics.

Sungsu Kim is a PhD candidate in Grady College at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on strategic crisis communications.

Dasia Danzy is an undergraduate student majoring in public relations in Grady College at the University of Georgia. Dasia is interested in strategic sports communication.

Chapter 8 Title: Community Resilience and Social Media: A Primer on Opportunities to Foster Collective Adaptation Using New Technologies

J. Brian Houston is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Director of the Disaster and Community Crisis Center (dcc.missouri.edu) at the University of Missouri. Houston’s research focuses on communication at all phases of disasters and on the mental health effects and political consequences of community crises.

Chapter 9 Title: Site-Seeing in Disaster: Revisiting Online Social Convergence a Decade Later

Amanda Lee Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Information Technology & Cybersecurity at Brigham Young University. Her research interests span human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, social computing, software engineering, and disaster studies. Her current work investigates the use of social media during crises and mass emergencies with particular attention to how they affect emergency response organizations.

Chapter 10 Title: Dormant Disaster Organizing and the Role of Social Media

Chih-Hui Lai (PhD, Rutgers University, 2012) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Technology at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. Her research investigates how individuals, groups, and organizations use multiple media modalities to communicate and coordinate in the face of disasters, and how relationships evolve or emerge through these processes. Her works have been published in top-tier communication journals, including Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human Communication Research, and many others.

New Media in Time of Crisis Editor: Keri K. Stephens

Keri K. Stephens is an Associate Professor in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests bring an organizational, organizing, and technology perspective to understanding complex contexts like emergencies, disasters, and healthcare organizations. She has over 60 peer-reviewed publications, and her most recent monograph, Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication (Oxford UPress), provides a longitudinal perspective on how and why mobile communication shifts power and control dynamics in organizational contexts. Her research has been funded by organizations like NSF, CPRIT, US Census Bureau, ORAU, and TxDOT.