Effective communication determines whether communities survive and recover from extreme events, yet it remains undertheorized as infrastructure in its own right. Drawing on statewide surveys, message design experiments, participatory design with diverse Texas communities, and machine learning analysis of disaster social media data, this talk presents a program of research positioning communication at the center of disaster resilience. From Hurricane Harvey, where residents turned to private social media networks to coordinate rescues when formal channels failed, to Winter Storm Uri, where communication breakdowns amplified cascading infrastructure failures, to research on the devastating floods in Central Texas in 2025 and how flood-related road signs fail us, these studies demonstrate that the gap in disaster resilience is fundamentally a communication gap. This talk argues for a paradigm shift: moving from treating communication as ancillary to recognizing it as the connective tissue between technical systems, human behavior under extreme conditions, and the policy decisions that shape community outcomes. It is an integral form of societal infrastructure.
Keri K. Stephens is the George Christian Centennial Professor in Communication and Co-Director of the Technology & Information Policy Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. Over more than 25 years of interdisciplinary research, she has developed a sustained program of scholarship on how people communicate during extreme events, with emphasis on flood risk, disaster response, and human-AI teaming. She has secured over $10 million in external funding and published over 140 peer-reviewed articles across communication, disaster science, and interdisciplinary journals. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and author of five books, with two forthcoming in 2026: Handbook of Infrastructure Communication: Bridging Technical and Social Dimensions (Wiley) and The Social Scientist’s Grant Guide: Funding Your Future in Research (Bloomsbury). She is a member of the UT Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Dr. Stephens holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication from UT Austin and a B.S. in Biochemistry from Texas A&M University.