A Humanist Approach to Digital Risk Communication: Investigating Graduate Student Responses to COVID-19 E-Mails

Abstract

This dissertation research is a case study centered on graduate student responses to eight (8) risk and crisis emails sent from two (2) University of Minnesota leaders delivered between February 2020 and August 2021. The study joins conversations about technical communication, risk and crisis communication, as well as advancing work on digital risk communication. As such, it forwards a working definition of digital risk communication as digital and rhetorically focused discourse which aims to assess, manage, and mitigate risk while centering an audience’s diverse needs through specific, clear, and organized means. Broadly, this research asks: “How did graduate students respond to the University of Minnesota’s digital risk communication strategies during the first eighteen months of the COVID-19 crisis,” and, “What can be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic’s first eighteen months to improve, prepare, or better anticipate future health crises with digital materials,” while taking a technical communication-centered approach to research and scholarship. While investigating graduate student responses to COVID-19 emails from University of Minnesota leaders during the first 18 months of the pandemic, it was found that that students were fairly dissatisfied with the risk & crisis response, and didn’t feel the emails were concise, organized, or specific in content or form, all of which are key components of a useful crisis communication. As a result, graduate student feedback was aggregated into a more equitable risk & crisis communication toolkit with templates that users in the future can adapt and use with the goal of a more human-informed, people-first crisis response.