Disaster Publics and the Post Legitimate Condition

• In Event: Collective Behavior and Social Movements Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 2: Movements as Responses to Crises

Abstract

The 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, precipitated a profound collapse of institutional credibility. Facing conflicting official directives and tangible material harm, residents turned to digital spaces to reconstitute meaning and authority. This article introduces the concept of the disaster public to explain how collectives form and persist amid acute institutional failure and symbolic rupture. Unlike traditional models of the public sphere or identity-based counterpublics, disaster publics are defined by shared exposure to harm and the improvisational assembly of legitimacy in the absence of trusted institutional anchors. Drawing on a mixed-methods analysis of 866 Facebook posts using a binary coding scheme across twenty-three dimensions, the study identifies three core features of this formation. First, disaster publics exhibit symbolic hybridity, where participants blend scientific data, legal registers, spiritual appeals, and embodied testimony to assert credibility. Second, they display emotional pluralism, characterized by the simultaneous circulation of layered affects such as anger, irony, fear, care, and reason. Third, these publics operate within a post-legitimate condition, bypassing official channels to develop peer-based knowledge infrastructures and vernacular expertise. The analysis reveals divergent tactical repertoires: Riverbend Mutuals served as an infrastructural hub for mutual aid and logistical coordination, while Plume Watch functioned as an insurgent public defined by institutional critique and symbolic resistance. Despite these differences, both groups engaged in intensive epistemic labor to create a provisional order. These findings suggest that disaster publics are adaptive social configurations that transcend traditional partisan polarization. As systemic fragility and institutional erosion become defining features of contemporary risk society, the disaster public emerges as a vital, albeit precarious, mechanism for collective survival and meaning-making in the ruins of institutional trust.

Author

• Will Charles, Miami University-Ohio