Community resilience in a cascading disaster: enacting a hybrid hyperlocal community of practices (HCoPs) through online/offline communication

Abstract

When multiple types of disasters occur sequentially–a cascading disaster–certain adaptive capacities might become temporarily ineffective or invalid. Advancing an understanding of community resilience in the context of cascading disasters, the current study provides empirical evidence of a hybrid hyperlocal community of practice (HCoP), a novel communicative process facilitated by hybrid organizing, during the 2021 Texas, U.S.A. winter storm. Using interviews with 30 residents in a city that experienced critical infrastructure failures⁣–i.e. power or water outages–we conducted a constant comparative analysis to explore how residents coped with a cascading winter storm through communicative practices. This study contributes to the community of practice literature by explicating how a sense of community is strengthened during a disaster through a hybrid hyperlocal community of practice (HCoP), and elaborates the actual mechanisms leading to community dysfunction when adaptive capacities became temporarily ineffective or invalid during a cascading disaster.