morgan.wickline@uky.edu
Chaos theory holds that systems act in unpredictable nonlinear ways and that their behavior can only be observed, never predicted. This is an informative model for an organization in crisis. The West Virginia water contamination crisis, which began on January 9, 2014, fits the criteria of a system in chaos. Given the lack of appropriate response from the established organizations involved, many emergent organizations formed to help fill unmet informational and physical needs of the affected population. Crisis researchers have observed these ephemeral organizations for decades, but the recent proliferation of information communication technologies (ICT’s) have made their activities more widespread and observable. In West Virginia, their activities were indispensable to the affected population and helped restore a sense of normalcy. In this chaotic system, the emergent organizations functioned as strange attractors, helping move the system away from bifurcation and towards normalcy. This dissertation uses a qualitative approach to study the emergent organizations and how their presence and efforts were the mechanism that spurred the self-organization process.
Bio
Morgan Wickline Getchell is a doctoral graduate in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Kentucky. She received her BA communication from Western Kentucky University and her MA in communication from UK. Her research focuses on risk and crisis communication. She has worked on several funded projects through the Department of Homeland Security and her research spans a wide range of topics from foodborne illness outbreaks to infectious diseases and natural disasters.She has published in several academic journals: Health Promotion and Practice, Business and Society Review, and Computers in Human Behavior. She is currently writing her dissertation, which focused on the 2014 water contamination event in West Virginia.
She teaches in the department of Integrated Strategic Communication and has experience teaching public relations, direct marketing, message planning, creative campaign design, research methods, and media law and ethics.