Research

Crises can negatively impact communities that are already marginalized by existing social systems. Building trusting relationships with these communities is paramount to crisis and risk communication effectiveness, but little work has focused on the strategies crisis and risk communicators use to do so. Against this backdrop, we conducted a two-phase qualitative study with community health workers (CHWs) working in Latine communities. CHWs typically come from the communities they serve and are tasked with communicating important crisis and risk communication information to community members. In Phase 1, 20 CHWs were interviewed, and 21 CHWs were interviewed for Phase 2. Our findings show that CHWs seek to build trusting relationships with community members by leveraging shared social identities drawing from two important identity-based theories in communication—communication theory of identity and social identity theory. Specifically, CHWs in our study leveraged social identities including ethnic, national, and immigrant identities; family members and neighbors; and as economically and legally precarious immigrants. Extending theorizing in crisis and risk communication, our findings also show that identities are not a panacea for trust building in crisis and risk contexts but can lead to identity disconnections that can negatively affect communication. However, our findings also show that CHWs navigate these disconnections through creative communication. Our discussion highlights the implications for crisis and risk communication theory and practice.

How news media make emerging technological risks visible shapes how those technologies enter public debate. This study examines generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) risk representation in Australian digital news through a mixed-methods content analysis of 379 articles from seven outlets published between 2020 and March 2024. Ethical, legal, and regulatory compliance risks receive the most attention, followed by economic and employment concerns and technical performance risks, while sociocultural and mental health risks remain marginal. Extinction risk also receives substantial coverage. Public outlets give greater attention to governance, education, and sociocultural concerns, whereas private outlets more often emphasize technical and extinction risks. Public outlets also contain more original reporting and Australian contextualization. Across the sample, GPT is frequently named but rarely explained in technical detail, while developing country and Global South contexts receive limited attention. These findings contribute to a contextual understanding of how GenAI risks are represented in Australian digital news.

Crisis communication research is strongly influenced by the crises of our day. In this essay, we review the trends in crisis communication scholarship with reference to two major crises that have significantly influenced scholarship and society. Existing crisis communication scholarship has bifurcated into two groups, examining the base crisis responses and reputation management messages. We highlight useful models that can assist in this research such as the internalization, explanation, distribution, and action model (IDEA) model and the revised model of reputation repair (REMREP). Further, we argue the key to the future of crisis communication scholarship is a holistic approach that marries protecting stakeholder safety and building healthy relationships with stakeholders as the twin pillars of successful crisis communication. Like load-bearing pillars in construction, these two pillars are both necessary for organizations and communities to withstand the stress of crises. The failure of either pillar, in any type of crisis, can cause a collapse.

Existing research on Instagram-based political legitimation has largely focused on Western contexts, whereas leader-centered African cases and fragmented media settings remain underexplored. This study analyzes how Zimbabwe’s President, Emmerson Mnangagwa, constructs political legitimacy on Instagram over 8 years (2017–2025). Using Van Leeuwen’s four legitimation strategies and Kress and Van Leeuwen’s social semiotic grammar of visual design as the analytical framework, we employed Zeeschuimer, a browser-based social media data-collection tool, to purposively collect still photographs from the sampled period. We coded the posts as image–caption pairs according to Van Leeuwen’s typology and organized them into emerging thematic narratives of legitimation. Findings highlighted strategic narratives about Zimbabwe’s alignment with international powers, infrastructure development priorities, the people’s consensual choice, and regional leadership, collaboration, and support. We argue that these findings demonstrate Mnangagwa’s use of Instagram’s features for curated self-presentation and narrative control to build a discourse of competent, people-focused, and internationally recognized leadership that consistently downplays legitimacy-challenging information. This study offers a multimodal analytical perspective on political legitimacy in the Global South, extends the boundaries of political communication scholarship, and provides insights into how platform-based legitimation and affordances operate in Zimbabwe’s contested political environment.

Morris and VanHaitsma "assemble for this special issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs— in the pages of one of the most revered journals in rhetoric and public address— a cast of queer scholars and scholarship from across generations to reflect on and illustrate diverse perspectives concerning where queering public address has been since 2007 (and its longer history), what its current state entails and does not but should include, and where it might— should— venture into the future. Much has changed since the queer turn in the field began, with exhilarating and vexing challenges to whiteness, coloniality, transantagonism, ableism, and more in emergent scholarship. Research is also becoming much less US- centric than it was when Queering Public Address was published nearly two decades ago. What the very key term “queer/ing” meant variously then has transformed significantly over time. We have thus asked the contributors to time travel bidirectionally to account for and embody queer/ing rhetoric and public address for the readership, for the generation to come, of Rhetoric & Public Affairs and the field writ large."

Social media play crucial dialogic and strategic roles during paracrisis. Responding to a prior call to extend agenda‐setting theory to study paracrises, this manuscript builds on the literature by moving beyond the dominant focus on for‐profit organisations in public relations and crisis studies into the political sphere. Adopting unsupervised machine learning and qualitative methods, this study used a comprehensive dataset of 2451 user‐generated comments on X during the 2023 U.S. House of Representatives Speaker election to contribute to the broader discourses on paracrises. Findings from topic modelling revealed that the agenda narrative focused on House proceedings and conflicts, the GOP's internal struggle, a leadership crisis and Democratic alternatives, as well as shared political interests and ideologies. In addition, a combination of sentiment analysis and sentence mapping highlighted positive user comments focused on the theatricalisation of serious politics and on appreciation for Democratic comportment. Conversely, negative comments emphasised attacks on figures/party, criticism of legislative dysfunction, and mismanagement of resources. This study first advances a definition for political paracrisis and highlights the profound contribution of these findings to the praxis of crisis studies.

The transformative force of AI is largely redefining how public relations professionals approach their work, understand their responsibilities, and make sense of the meaning and value associated with being a PR practitioner. While research in other disciplines have increasingly recognized the implications of AI toward professional identities, this topic remains underexplored in the public relations field. Through a quantitative survey (N = 285), we assessed how PR practitioners experience professional identity threats across five dimensions: expertise, status position, autonomy, professional influence, and job responsibility. Our findings highlight that these perceived threats are associated with a combination of factors, including AI use patterns, attitudes and assessment of AI, and influences from leaders and peers. Overall, this study contributes to ongoing conversations about the impact of AI toward the future of public relations through a novel perspective exploring PR professional identities. It also offers practical insights for leaders and organizations on strategies to support PR practitioners in successfully navigating the AI-driven public relations landscape.

Discussing classic and cutting-edge research in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and its communication practices, this book critically examines key issues and debates of corporate social responsibility communication in global contexts.

This book conceptualizes CSR communication as a reflective practice anchored in organizational values, identity, and purpose, yet responsive to continually shifting societal expectations. It draws on current case studies to explain why reflective CSR communication has never been more crucial to help organizations articulate their evolving roles in society. Organized into three sections – core concepts, a framework for reflective practice, and applications in areas such as employee relations, crisis communication, and the rapidly developing terrain of artificial intelligence – it highlights how organizations can tell their CSR stories authentically to create ethical brand identities that can continue to resonate with their stakeholders.

The book will be of interest to advanced students, educators, researchers, and practitioners pursuing advanced credentials who are interested in the intersections of CSR and strategic communication, public relations, corporate communication, and communication management.

Social media is an indispensable component of strategic communication and public life in China, positioning it as a central arena for crisis communication research. As social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) scholarship expands, questions arise not only about what has been studied, but how methodological choices shape theory development. This study conducts a mixed-method review of 105 articles published between 2009 and 2025 in 15 SSCI-indexed journals spanning communication, public relations, risk and crisis management, and new media studies. By integrating manual coding, structural topic modeling (STM), and network analysis, the study demonstrates how mixed-method computational reviews can function as a theory-building device. Rather than cataloging topics, this approach maps the alignment between research topics, theoretical frameworks, and contextual dimensions, revealing under-theorized areas and methodological lock-ins. It identifies 13 research topics, highlights government-focused research as central, notes uneven use of framing theory and SCCT, and recognizes economic factors as an emerging contextual dimension. Overall, this study not only contributes methodological and theoretical insights to crisis communication scholarship by foregrounding China’s distinctive digital, institutional, and sociopolitical environment but also illuminates the theoretical and thematic blind spots generated by Western-influenced research agendas in engaging with the complex realities of non-Western societies.

This autoethnographic paper explores how I, as a woman of color from the Global South, construct, challenge, and reshape my environmental identity. Drawing on personal experiences, the paper traces my journey from an initial gender-neutral understanding of climate action to a gradual realization of the gender and regional inequalities embedded in global climate governance systems, ultimately seeking pathways for self-expression in academic research, policy engagement, and climate communication. This study reveals the dynamic shaping process of environmental identity within discourse structures. The paper not only reflects on the realities faced by women from the Global South in climate action, but also critically examines how the global climate communication system defines the roles of Southern women through a ‘victim-savior’ binary narrative. It explores the transition from being ‘defined’ by others to ‘self-defined’ within this system. In this process, I came to understand that environmental identity is not a static accumulation of individual experiences, but something continuously constructed through dialogue, negotiation, and resistance.