Integrating Citizen Science, GIS and Risk Communication: Toward Inclusive Disaster Management

Session Title: Integrating Citizen Science, GIS and Risk Communication: Toward Inclusive Disaster Management

Proposed format: Open Sessions

Session Description:

In an era of compounding hazards and contested information, disaster management increasingly depends on how knowledge is produced, mapped, and communicated among diverse actors. This session brings together three interlinked strands-citizen science, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and risk communication-and asks how their integration can advance more inclusive and equitable disaster management across the cycle of mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

Citizen science and participatory mapping reposition local communities from passive recipients of warnings to active producers of risk knowledge. Yet such participation raises sociological questions about whose data counts, how lay and expert knowledge are reconciled, and how power and inequality shape inclusion. GIS and geospatial technologies promise improved situational awareness and decision-making, but their design, access, and interpretation are socially structured, with consequences for visibility, surveillance, and marginalization. Risk communication binds these processes together, determining how mapped risks become meaningful, trusted, and actionable-or how they fuel misinformation and exclusion.

We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions on community-based and Indigenous mapping; crowdsourced geographic information; digital platforms and crisis informatics; the politics of spatial data and the digital divide; trust in risk communication; and participatory early-warning systems. By drawing scholars from across continents, the session advances a critical, comparative sociology of disasters attentive to data, mapping, and communication in times of crisis.

Keywords: citizen science; GIS; disaster management; risk communication; inclusion