Defense Date
4-22-2022
Graduation Date
Summer 8-13-2022
Availability
One-year Embargo
Submission Type
dissertation
Degree Name
PhD
Department
Communication and Rhetorical Studies
School
McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts
Committee Chair
Janie Harden Fritz
Committee Member
Ronald C. Arnett
Committee Member
Erik Garrett
Keywords
urban communication, urban planning, crisis communication, communication ethics, media ecology, complexity theory, participatory inquiry, community engaged scholarship, urban policy, urban ecology
Abstract
This project explores cities as urban ecologies of communication in which crises emerge and are given significance within the dialogic relations cultivated among public actors attempting to make a living, together, within the shared historical-cultural contexts of everyday life. To describe cities as urban ecologies of communication is to describe them in terms of urban communication and its interdisciplinary foundations in the study of rhetoric, philosophy, planning, policy, architecture, sociology, geography, and media. The first chapter introduces the challenges of urban risk and crisis management within the complex ecologies of communication constituted by cities and reviews how ‘risk’ and ‘crisis’ have been defined in discourses of urban planning and policy which have largely only been understood in terms of the techniques of emergency risk and disaster management which advocate for top-down responses to crises predicated on systems of prediction and control within cities. The second and third chapters of this project, review how cities throughout Europe and the United States have attempted to manage risk and crisis throughout history and provide a historical foundation developing of new theories and practices for urban risk and crisis management. Chapter four explores the philosophical and rhetorical foundations of a dialogic urbanism and urban communication praxis that are of requisite complexity for collaboratively managing the risks and crises made manifest within the dialogic complexity of urban ecologies of communication, elaborating how these phenomena become meaningful within the relations cultivated among individual and institutional actors dwelling within cities, themselves. This project concludes with a fifth chapter, returning to the 2005 case of urban risk and crisis management in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in order to demonstrate how concepts of dialogic urbanism and urban communication praxis could have generated more participatory and collaborative forms of response that would have been of requisite complexity for the communicative challenges generated before, during, and after the disaster of the storm itself.
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Hestdalen, A. (2022). Weathering the Storm: Navigating Urban Ecologies of Communication in Times of Crisis (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/2191
Additional Citations
Hestdalen, Austin (2022), ‘Urban risk and crisis communication in posthuman
cities: A media ecology approach’, Explorations in Media Ecology,
21:1, pp. 67–83, https://doi.org/10.1386/eme_00118_1
Included in
Applied Ethics Commons, Architectural History and Criticism Commons, Civic and Community Engagement Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Community-Based Learning Commons, Community-Based Research Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Economic Policy Commons, Emergency and Disaster Management Commons, Environmental Policy Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Health Policy Commons, Human Ecology Commons, Infrastructure Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Public Affairs Commons, Public Policy Commons, Public Relations and Advertising Commons, Quantitative, Qualitative, Comparative, and Historical Methodologies Commons, Rhetoric Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, Social Justice Commons, Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons, Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons, Urban Studies Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons