Hyperlocal Organizing: Collaborating for Recovery Over Time explores the difficult work of post-disaster recovery. Jack L. Harris, demonstrates that after disaster, broad interorganizational landscapes are needed to unite the grassroots, neighborhoods, communities, and institutions to solve problems of recovery and bring people home. Yet all too often, government disaster policy and institutions ignore the critical role of local knowledge and organizing. Exploring the organizational landscape of the mid-Atlantic United States after Hurricane Sandy, Harris reveals how participation and collaboration open multiple pathways to recovery after disaster by building resilience and democratizing governance. Using powerful theories of communicating and organizing, this book develops a new framework—hyperlocal organizing—to address the challenge of community survivability in the twenty-first century. Achieving community survivability requires robust organizational partnerships and interorganizational collaboration to solve collective problems. The lessons Harris presents are important not just for post-disaster recovery, but for addressing grand challenges such as climate change, environmental justice, and equitable community development. Scholars of environmental communication, disaster studies, and emergency management, will find this book of particular interest.

The world is wrought with risks that may harm people and cost lives. The news is riddled with reports of natural disasters (wildfires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes), industrial disasters (chemical spills, water and air pollution), and health pandemics (e.g., SARS, H1NI, COVID19). Effective risk communication is critical to mitigating harms. The body of research in this handbook reveals the challenges of communicating such messages, affirms the need for dialogue, embraces the role of instruction in proactively communicating risk, acknowledges the function of competing risk messages, investigates the growing influence of new media, and constantly reconsiders the ethical imperative for communicating recommendations for enhanced safety.

An examination of how the (hyper)local is the locus of real change Many of America’s downtowns, waterfronts, and innovation districts have experienced significant revitalization and reinvestment in recent years, but concentrated poverty and racial segregation remain persistent across thousands of urban, suburban, and rural neighborhoods. The coronavirus pandemic magnified this sustained and growing landscape of inequality. Uneven patterns of economic growth and investment require a shift in how communities are governed and managed. This shift must take into account the changing socioeconomic realities of regions and the pressing need to bring inclusive economic growth and prosperity to more people and places. In this context, place-based (“hyperlocal”) governance structures in the United States and around the globe have been both part of the problem and part of the solution. These organizations range from community land trusts to business improvement districts to neighborhood councils. However, very little systematic research has documented the full diversity and evolution of these organizations as part of one interrelated field. Hyperlocal helps fill that gap by describing the challenges and opportunities of “place governance.” The chapters in Hyperlocal explore both the tensions and benefits associated with governing places in an increasingly fragmented—and inequitable—economic landscape. Together they explore the potential of place governance to give stakeholders a structure through which to share ideas, voice concerns, advocate for investments, and co-design strategies with others both inside and outside their place. They also discuss how place governance can serve the interests of some stakeholders over others, in turn exacerbating wealth-based inequities within and across communities. Finally, they highlight innovative financing, organizing, and ownership models for creating and sustaining more effective and inclusive place governance structures. The authors hope to provoke new thinking among place governance practitioners, policymakers, private sector leaders, urban planners, scholars, students, and philanthropists about how, why, and for whom place governance matters. The book also provides guidance on how to improve place governance practice to benefit more people and places.

Feminist Mentoring in Academia offers a varied collection of autoethnographic and research-based accounts of support, struggle, and resilience from the ivory tower. Contributors write about the moments in-between, where feminist mentoring initiates, renews, thrives, and sometimes struggles. The work presented in this book highlights how feminist mentoring happens between professor and student; junior faculty and tenured; and occurs repeatedly. Featuring contributions from scholars at varying points in their academic careers, the chapters of this book propose best feminist mentorship practices, disclose personal narratives, and critique traditional forms of mentoring with visions for feminist mentorship futures. Scholars of communication, feminist studies, higher education, and sociology will find this book of particular interest.

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply shaken societies and lives around the world. This powerful book reveals how the pandemic has intensified socio-economic problems and inequalities across the world whilst offering visions for a better future informed by social movements and public sociology. Bringing together experts from 27 countries, the authors explore the global echoes of the pandemic and the different responses adopted by governments, policy makers and activists. The new expressions of social action, and forms of solidarity and protest, are discussed in detail, from the Black Lives Matter protests to the French Strike Movement and the Lebanese Uprising. This is a unique global analysis on the current crisis and the contemporary world and its outcomes.

In the modern world, digital communication presents a dual role of advantage and challenge. The surge in social media platforms and technological innovations has revolutionized interpersonal interaction, information accessibility, and communication methods. Nonetheless, this intricate landscape poses significant obstacles for scholars, researchers, and students across diverse domains. The infusion of social media into realms such as communication science, advertising, and public relations underscores the need for authoritative resources that can illuminate current trends and future projections in digital communication. Moreover, given the dynamic nature of digital technologies and social media platforms, continuous and pertinent research is imperative to fathom their societal impact and communication implications. Offering a definitive solution to the challenges presented by the digital communication revolution, Advancements in Socialized and Digital Media Communications, edited by Ebru Gülbu? Erol and Michael Kuyucu, emerges as a pivotal work. This book provides a comprehensive compilation of both empirical and theoretical insights, spanning a spectrum of digital communication facets. Encompassing disciplines like public relations, journalism, marketing, cinema, and radio television, the book equips researchers, academics, and students with comprehensive perspectives, research findings, comparative analyses, and in-depth case studies. Addressing a diverse audience, from seasoned scholars to curious professionals and the public, the book's thought-provoking chapters traverse social networks, digital radio, video-sharing platforms, advertising, and reputation management, offering a well-rounded grasp of digital communication's intricacies. By delivering up-to-date and extensive explorations of digital media and communication, this book empowers readers to navigate the complexities of this swiftly evolving realm.

This book explores technology and the global tech industry in relation to social, health, economic, and environmental relations and politics. Peter C. Little argues that the power and influence of electronics and Big Tech—from the proliferation of digital platforms to the expansion of global electronic waste streams—is a political-ecological problem that impacts communities and lives in both the Global North and South. From intense resource extraction, industrial pollution, and surging health and economic inequalities, to data-driven surveillance, platform economy proliferation and intrusion, and Silicon Valley corporate-power, Little argues that the political ecology of tech matters now more than ever. Based on a mixture of engagements with tech criticism, ethnographic case studies, and critical analysis and development of guiding concepts—ranging from technocapital to technoprecarious political ecology—the book exposes and interrogates the underlying toxicity, precarity, and planetary politics of global tech. Critical Zones of Technopower and Global Political Ecology also tracks justice struggles that confront technopower, including “just tech” forms of social action that further reinforce the importance of a global political ecology of technocapitalism in the digital age.