Crisis Narratives organized a research day with a theme “Perspective of COVID-19 Communication and Narratives of Social Media” featuring research projects addressing issues related to crisis communication and social media.
The research day was opened by THL’s Director General Markku Tervahauta and in his opening words he was pressing the importance of our research topic. COVID-19 crisis management was personified to several public authorities, including THL’s director general, so he was pointing out how crucial it is to understand that experts had to adopt a whole new role as a public figure during the crisis.
The day was followed by two thematic seminar sessions with presentations from different research projects followed by facilitated discussion by Crisis Narratives’ Principal Investigators Tuukka Tammi and Nitin Sawhney.
Themes and notions that arose from the discussions reflected on the timely and accurate climate of crisis communication in post-covid era. Among other topics, complexities and contradictions of narratives, importance of trust as a bridge between citizens and authorities, different levels of governing and communicating crisis, and the role of nation state were discussed in length with participants. The extended crisis, such as COVID-19 sparked discussion of temporal and liminar elements of the crisis and a question how we should capture and track the changes of the extended crisis. Expert’s roles in the crisis were also discussed, and it was noticed that during COVID-19 crisis, some doctors’ roles were reminiscent of social media influencers.
We enjoyed the vivid and inspiring presentations and discussions, and look forward to continuing networking and collaborating with both academics and practitioners working in the field. We are aiming to build a network for collaboration and plan joint-events with people interested in working with us.
Overall, our Research Day was a success -thank you for participating! If you missed out or couldn’t attend, please find the recorded video of the seminar below, and the program of the day here.