Decolonizing Disaster Communication: How Marginalized Networks Outperform Top-Down Systems Globally
Original framing: “Many local communities know how to communicate during disasters. Let’s learn from them” — The Conversation - Global
The voices most absent from disaster communication narratives are those of *undocumented migrants*, who build networks in liminal spaces like detention centers or informal settlements (e.g., Rohingya refugee camps’ *mosque-based alert systems*). In the U.S., *Black women* like Fannie Lou Hamer organized *freedom schools* during Hurricane Katrina that doubled as disaster hubs, yet their leadership is erased from official histories. These marginalized networks operate under *hyper-surveillance*, where their communication is pathologized as 'gossip' or 'illegal'—a racialized framing that justifies state violence against them during crises.
The sensationalized framing of informal disaster networks as 'innovative' obscures their systemic roots in state abandonment, colonial erasure, and neoliberal governance failures.
These networks are not exceptions but *predictable outcomes* of policies that dismantle public infrastructure, criminalize indigenous knowledge, and monetize crisis response—mechanisms that repeat across contexts from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. The trickster reveals the absurdity of treating their labor as optional while extracting their data, while the indigenous lens exposes how colonialism’s disruption of relational systems created the very crises they now 'solve.' Solutions must move beyond co-optation to *restorative justice*: formalizing mutual aid as labor, reversing colonial erasures, and designing hybrid systems that treat these networks as *public goods*, not just 'lessons.' The path forward lies in dismantling the extractive frameworks that demand these networks exist in the first place.