Sociocybernetic Perspectives on Disaster Risk Communication and Societal Resilience In Turbulent Times

Contemporary societies face overlapping and compounding risks: natural disasters, pandemics, geopolitical instability, and the accelerating impacts of climate change. These crises do not arrive in isolation; they interact with, and are mediated by, existing social structures, political systems, and communication infrastructures in ways that are poorly captured by linear models of risk. This session applies sociocybernetic frameworks to the sociology of disaster risk communication and societal resilience.

A central concern is how different functional systems, political, scientific, mass media, and legal, observe and communicate risk, and how the structural couplings between them shape, and frequently distort, the flow of risk-relevant information to affected populations. Of particular interest is the situation of structurally marginalised groups, including foreign residents and linguistic minorities, whose positions at the periphery of dominant communication systems make them especially vulnerable when disasters strike. Their experience of exclusion is not incidental but systemic, a product of how communication systems select and filter information according to their own internal codes.

The session also engages questions of second-order observation: who is positioned to observe the observers, to notice the blind spots built into official risk communication regimes? Sociocybernetics, with its recursive epistemology, offers tools for this kind of reflexive analysis that mainstream disaster sociology frequently lacks. Papers exploring trust and legitimacy in risk governance, the temporal dimensions of preparedness as distinct from emergency response, the role of civil society organisations in bridging communicative gaps, and comparative case studies are all welcome. Both empirical contributions and theoretical reconstructions are invited.