ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 on ‘Community, Crisis, Risk: Communicating (Dis)Engagement’ seeks to assess the growing body of the community engagement literature – with special emphasis on communicative dynamics – in the light of the pandemic outbreak. Noting that the ideas about ‘community engagement’ have surfaced and intensified since the 1990s, coinciding with the growing hegemony of the governance paradigm, the discussion concentrates on the ‘engagement–disengagement paradox’ to observe that the COVID-19 pandemic has vehemently reinforced the stiff challenge of negotiating and/or reconciling ‘engagement’ with ‘distancing’. In emphasising the simultaneity of engagement and disengagement the chapter also scrutinises the contours of crisis communication and risk communication, the vital thematic sources of exploring and managing outbreaks and catastrophes. Analysing the existing literature on (community) engagement communication the chapter identifies the fundamental problems in an overwhelming concern with ‘action plan’ orientation in the case of the crisis communication, and with the ‘toolkit’ approach in the case of risk communication. The multiperspectival analysis also shows how an ‘apolitical’ mission results in skewed communicative dynamics breeding inequitable and non-participatory power relations in the name of ‘wellbeing’ of people.
