New Media in Times of Crisis (Edited by Keri K. Stephens) provides an interdisciplinary look at research focused around how people organize in times of crisis.  This book is grounded in the practices of first responders, crisis communicators, people experiencing tragic events, and communities who organize on- and off-line to make sense of their experiences.  The collection of chapters advances our knowledge in crisis, disaster, and emergency communication in an era where a host of new media is available at peoples’ fingertips.  The authors draw upon a wide range of theories and frameworks with the goal of establishing new directions for research and practice.

Readers will walk away with behind-the-scenes insights into how firefighters handle close calls, emergency response teams coordinate, crisis communicators adapt to changing technologies, and people around the globe converge online during times of high uncertainty.  Chapters reveal the latest evacuation practices, workplace safety challenges, crisis social media usage, and strategies for making emergency alerts on U.S. mobile phones constructive and helpful.  Finally, we look at community resilience, and what happens to organizations that form during a disaster and then become dormant or simply disappear.  Together, this book illustrates how organizing during times of crisis is happening today, and it plants seeds for how to study and understand these phenomena in an ever-changing world.

This book came out of ideas created by the Organizing and Communicating with Technology Lab.