Social interaction in high stakes crisis communication

Abstract

The contributions to this special issue investigate rare, acute and hard-to-access interactions in situations of crisis, conflict and emergency. They study low frequency but high stakes communication between crisis-related professionals and citizens, or among professional parties themselves. The data used for the analysis are audio and/or video recordings of naturally occurring and real-life events, either actual crisis situations or training situations. The settings range from audio-only emergency telephone calls to complex multimodal training events, including police negotiations with suicidal persons, suicide helplines, police-lay people interactions, call/dispatch centres, mass casualty exercises, and United Nations crisis management training. By building on the background and principles of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EMCA), the studies focus on live interactions in various situations involving crisis as they unfold in real time. The topics range from preparing and training for crises before they have happened to ongoing live crisis; how decision-making happens in time-limited environments which are also uncertain or ambiguous in nature; how professionals deal with unpredictable external challenges (e.g., technology failure), and how the management of extraordinary events may nevertheless be routinized. The papers in the special issue show how interaction in crisis settings actually unfolds, moment by moment and step by step. They complement an emerging body of EMCA work on acute crisis, which is not only proving impactful on the organizations themselves (e.g., via research-based training), but also on our fundamental understanding of the organization of talk.