Community resilience in a cascading disaster: enacting a hybrid hyperlocal community of practices (HCoPs) through online/offline communication

Abstract

ABSTRACT When multiple types of disasters occur sequentially – a cascading disaster – certain adaptive capacities might become temporarily ineffective or invalid. Advancing an understanding of community resilience in the context of cascading disasters, the current study provides empirical evidence of a hybrid hyperlocal community of practice (HCoP), a novel communicative process facilitated by hybrid organizing, during the 2021 Texas, U.S.A. winter storm. Using interviews with 30 residents in a city that experienced critical infrastructure failures⁣ – i.e. power or water outages – we conducted a constant comparative analysis to explore how residents coped with a cascading winter storm through communicative practices. This study contributes to the community of practice literature by explicating how a sense of community is strengthened during a disaster through a hybrid hyperlocal community of practice (HCoP), and elaborates the actual mechanisms leading to community dysfunction when adaptive capacities became temporarily ineffective or invalid during a cascading disaster.