Jack O’Byrne, Co-Principal Investigator and PhD Candidate, conducted the interview with Alan Jennings on February 16, 2012 in Bethlehem, PA for the Citizen Resiliency in Local Disasters project on behalf of the Metropolitan Institute of Virginia Tech (communityresiliencenetworks.wordpress.com This research project will study how citizens merge into responsive communities, make an impact, and then dissolve during and after a disaster. It will bring into light locally significant disasters that do not earn national headlines and where the local community turns to their own resources to respond. Too often these local disasters and citizen responses are not studied but they are vital to deepening of our understanding of community resilience and the dynamics of citizen engagement. We will uncover the dynamics of community emergence in response to a disaster. Questions considered will include: who organizes citizens into a community, how, and why? How do they respond to the disaster? How is technology, especially social media, mobilized for community organization and relief operations? And finally, what leads to the disbanding of these communities and is there any institutional memory preserved? Principal Investigators: Kevin C. Desouza and Maggie Cowell Jack O’Byrne is a mid-career PhD Candidate with Virginia Tech’s Center for Public Administration and Policy. He is a former local government executive, a Japan Society Local Government and Public Policy Fellow, and attended the …
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