A disaster shifts geography, people, and culture. It also initiates movement in space, causes various networks to form, and creates a local space for global stakeholders to act. Different types of networked communications begin to occur. Daniel Aldrich defines a disaster as “an event that suspends normal activities and threatens or causes severe, communitywide damage” . Indeed, larger-scale crises create disruptions in normalcy by causing threats to living entities’ well-being and natural or infrastructural damages. The United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) defines a disaster as “a serious disruption of the functioning of a community or a society at any scale due to hazardous events interacting with conditions of exposure, vulnerability and capacity, leading to one or more of the following: human, material, economic and environmental losses and impacts” (“Disaster”). Therefore, disasters are events that have extreme, largescale impacts that affect a great number of lives. They can have a multidimensional effect that requires the involvement of national, local and international entities to address the aftermath. So, disasters disrupt people’s normal lives, but they also bring local people together to form various communities both in online and offline spaces via public discourses on the web, collective interactions in transcultural ways, and through the sharing of the affective sentiment. As such, the discourses of local catastrophic disasters transcend boundaries as these disasters become a global concern.
Note: This is a part of an introduction from the book " Transnational Assemblages: Social Justice and Crisis Communication during Disaster" written by one of our blogger friends Sweta Baniya. This book can be accessed by visiting this link: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/swr/assemblages/
