The Crisis and Risk Communication Collaborative (C3) examines communication in contexts where information is evolving, uncertainty is high, and decisions matter.
Housed in the School of Communication at Florida State University, C3 brings together faculty, students, scholars, and practitioners to advance crisis and risk communication research, support student learning, and connect scholarship with real-world communication challenges.
Advancing Crisis and Risk Communication
C3 supports theoretically grounded, rigorous research across a broad range of crisis and risk communication contexts.
Our work is guided by the problems and questions shaping the field, with openness to the theoretical and methodological approaches best suited to investigating them. We are interested in how communication is created, shared, interpreted, evaluated, trusted, and acted upon across changing social, organizational, technological, and information environments.
Through research, collaboration, teaching, and student engagement, C3 contributes to the continued development of crisis and risk communication scholarship and its application beyond the university.
Areas of Inquiry
- Crisis & Risk Communication
- Communication in complex, uncertain, and high-stakes situations.
- Hazards, Warnings & Uncertainty
- How risk, hazards, warnings, and uncertainty are communicated, interpreted, and used in decision-making.
- Trust, Credibility & Public Response
- How people evaluate information and sources, form perceptions and judgments, and respond to communication.
- AI, Emerging Technologies & Information Environments
- How technologies, platforms, and changing information environments influence the creation, circulation, and interpretation of crisis and risk communication.
- Strategic & Organizational Communication
- How organizations communicate, respond, adapt, and engage with stakeholders before, during, and after challenging events.
Connecting Scholarship and Practice
Many of the most important challenges in crisis and risk communication emerge where research and practice intersect.
C3 engages with researchers, organizations, agencies, communication professionals, and other partners interested in understanding and addressing crisis and risk communication challenges.
These connections can support collaborative and applied research, audience research, message development and evaluation, and knowledge exchange. Engagement with practitioners can also identify emerging problems, provide insight into changing communication environments, and inform new directions for scholarship and teaching.