"Not all crises are created equal": Online narratives about COVID-19 and induced earthquakes in the province of Groningen, The Netherlands

Abstract

This article explores the COVID-19 pandemic as it interacts with other vulnerabilities, risks, and disasters people experience. It examines online narratives about COVID-19 from people suffering from induced seismicity in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands, posted on social media, blogs, and websites, complemented with ethnographic data. Focusing on social and discursive practices, the article looks at how risk, disaster, and crisis are talked about and mobilized. The narrative data shows interrelated layers of vulnerability and the experience of a compounded disaster. Narratives indicate that their composers and sharers understand disasters as produced and constructed, and use COVID-19 to reframe risk, disaster, and crisis. More importantly the data demonstrates how COVID-19 is employed as an opportunity to draw attention to marginality, inequality, and the experience of another type of disaster, and to reveal taken-for-granted power relations and impel political action.