Introduction. Trust and Narratives of Crisis and Catastrophe

Introduction to the Special Issue by the Guest Editors

Doing Trust and Crisis Communication. Narratives of the 2021 Explosion in the Chempark Leverkusen

According to governmental recommendations and scholarship concerning crisis communication, which have emerged from the 1980s onwards, an important characteristic of successful disaster-related crisis communication is its capacity for developing or restoring trust. This article demonstrates how, in the aftermath of a tank farm explosion on 27 July 2021 in the waste incineration plant Chem-park in Leverkusen, the managing company, Currenta, engaged in crisis communication in a way that can indeed be interpreted as a form of ‘doing trust.’ By offering a discourse analysis of the statements published by Currenta on a newly created info page and its Twitter account, the paper explores the emergence of a specific crisis narrative connected to that aim. Our study shows how Currenta’s crisis narrative depicted the company as trustworthy by referring to its attempts at reflecting the values of integrity, transparency and (willingness to) dialogue. We situate these attempts in the context of competing narratives which, disseminated by other actors such as journalists, environmental activists and individual social media users, ‘revealed’ an alleged deceptiveness of the company and presented it as untrustworthy

Repensar el afuera-adentro de la catástrofe. Perspectivas de la historia enlazada y de los Estudios Críticos (decoloniales) sobre desastres

En este artículo recuperamos la perspectiva de la historia enlazada para pensar los desastres lentos en clave decolonial. Proponemos una lectura de diversas catástrofes ocurridas en distintos puntos del mundo que, aunque a primera vista parecen no tener vínculos, tras ser observadas desde la interseccionalidad o la maraña, inauguran una reestructuración de las coordenadas de tiempo y espacio tradicionales. Sugerimos seguir el trazado de líneas de continuidad colonialistas presentes en los relatos hegemónicos sobre desastres, para luego hacer ingresar relatos de lo que se ha dado en conocer como periferia del sistema-mundo y abordar, entonces, tempoespacialidad otra

Systeme und Organisationen unter Stress: Zur Geschichte der sozialwissenschaftlichen Katastrophenforschung (1949–1979)

Wie reagieren Menschen auf Katastrophen? Wie lassen sich Bevölkerungen in Extremsituationen führen? Mit diesen Fragen beschäftigten sich in den 1950er-, 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren mehrere US-amerikanische, teilweise durch die Armee finanzierte Forschungsgruppen. Sie waren interdisziplinär zusammengesetzt, aber mehrheitlich soziologisch ausgerichtet. Innerhalb wie außerhalb der USA studierten sie das Stressverhalten von Individuen und Gruppen in Tornados, eingeschneiten Autobahnraststätten und »racial riots« sowie ergänzend in Laborsimulationen. Anhand zeitgenössischer Publikationen und interner Akten werden in diesem Aufsatz die Erkenntnisinteressen und Untersuchungsfelder der sozialwissenschaftlichen Katastrophenforschung, ihre Befunde und deren Nutzung dargestellt. Die Tätigkeit der Wissenschaftler/innen stand im Kontext des Kalten Kriegs und eines sich verschiebenden Gefahrensinns. Dabei ließen sich die Forscher/innen keineswegs vollständig politisch vereinnahmen, sondern verfolgten durchaus eigene Interessen und gaben mitunter Antworten, die den Intentionen der Auftraggeber zuwiderliefen.How do human beings behave in a disaster? How can populations be governed in extreme situations? These were some of the questions that drove the activities of several American, partly army-funded, research groups during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. These groups were interdisciplinary but mainly interested in sociological questions. In the US and abroad, they studied the stress reactions of individuals and groups in tornados, blizzards and racial riots, as well as during laboratory simulations. Analysing some of their publications and internal documents, this article explores the research goals and findings of social science disaster research and their application. The researchers’ activities must be interpreted in the context of the Cold War and of changing conceptions of danger. However, the paper shows that their work was by no means fully determined by the political agenda of their sponsors – they followed their own research interests, producing results that sometimes deeply questioned the intentions and policies of their patrons