ABSTRACT
The ubiquity of crisis situations—both large and small, full-blown and pending—makes it crucial to trace how organizations understand and act in response. In this chapter, we take crisis communication to be an ongoing process of meaning-making between communities and institutions, to mitigate potential harm and enable renewal. We review four primary research traditions in crisis communication scholarship, along with some practical applications. We close by discussing two recent theoretical frameworks that have proved promising to rebuild in post-crisis situations—resilience and discourse(s) of renewal.
