Metacommunication During Disaster Response

Abstract

“To anticipate and forestall disasters is to understand regularities in the ways small events can combine to have disproportionately large effects.” Taking Weick’s observation to heart, we examine teleconference calls between Louisiana local and state officials and federal officials as Hurricane Katrina gathered momentum by applying action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA). AIDA highlights the linkages between communication dilemmas and communication practices. We analyze “reporting” as a metacommunicative speech act that implicated pragmatic communication dilemmas of how to act in the face of emerging disaster. We explicate how, during the Hurricane Katrina teleconferences, “reporting” shaped and constrained the formulation of problems and responses by creating a structure that facilitated order while inhibiting the identification of and “talking through” of confusion points, and the communicative sharing of local resources. As such, we identify how sensemaking is interconnected with interactional framing. Reporting thus constituted a “small event” that occurred with “regularity” during the Hurricane Katrina disaster.