Strategic Communication, Resilience and Democracy Building - JKM543

• Anglický název: Strategic Communication, Resilience and Democracy Building
• Český název: Strategická komunikace, resilience a budování demokracie
• Zajišťuje: Katedra marketingové komunikace a public relations (23-KMKPR)
• Fakulta: Fakulta sociálních věd
• Platnost: od 2025
• Semestr: letní
• E-Kredity: 3
• Způsob provedení zkoušky: letní s.:
• Rozsah, examinace: letní s.:1/1, Z [HT]
• Počet míst: 20 / 20 (20)
• Minimální obsazenost: neomezen
• 4EU+: ne
• Virtuální mobilita / počet míst pro virtuální mobilitu: ne
• Stav předmětu: vyučován
• Jazyk výuky: angličtina
• Způsob výuky: prezenční
• Poznámka: předmět je možno zapsat mimo plán; povolen pro zápis po webu; při zápisu přednost, je-li ve stud. plánu
• Garant: doc. PhDr. Denisa Hejlová, Ph.D.
• Vyučující: prof. Josef Pallas, Ph.D., MBA
• Třída: Courses for incoming students

Anotace

Strategic communication is increasingly practiced in environments shaped by overlapping crises: misinformation and disinformation, “fake news” and algorithmic amplification, war and geopolitical instability, democratic backsliding and institutional distrust, and intensifying ecological disruption. In such contexts, the conventional promise of strategic communication—clarity, alignment, control, consistency, reputation management—becomes fragile. Communication is not merely a tool for managing crises; it is often part of how crises are produced, contested, and governed. This course introduces resilience as a critical concept for rethinking what “strategic communication” can and should mean under conditions of uncertainty, risk, and moral ambiguity.

The course offers a conceptual and practical framework for understanding resilience beyond its popular “bounce back” cliché. Students are introduced to the genealogies of resilience (engineering, ecological, socio-ecological, cultural, political and philosophical) and to debates about why the concept travels so easily across domains while also risking vagueness, depoliticization, and the shifting of responsibility from institutions to individuals and communities. With this foundation, the course explores how strategic communication must take contemporary risks seriously—especially those that threaten democratic life, collective trust, and ecological viability.

A key premise is that resilience is not only a property of systems; it is also a practice: a way of relating to uncertainty, acting under incomplete knowledge, and sustaining ethical responsibility when the “right thing” is disputed. Students will therefore learn to analyze and design communication not simply as messaging, but as judgment, attention, and institutional practice—capable of either stabilizing fragile orders or enabling necessary transformation.

Poslední úprava: Konrádová Marcela, Mgr., Ph.D. (06.01.2026)

Cíl předmětu

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• explain key genealogies of resilience and identify what each implies for strategic communication;
• analyze strategic communication in crisis contexts (mis/disinformation, democratic fragility, war-related polarization, ecological risk) with attention to ethics, legitimacy, and institutional trust;
• apply complexity-oriented perspectives (including panarchy and entropy as analytical lenses) to understand cascading crises and communication breakdowns;
• conduct theoretically informed analyses using Czech empirical material, linking concepts to cases with methodological rigor

Poslední úprava: Konrádová Marcela, Mgr., Ph.D. (06.01.2026)

Deskriptory

The course combines resilience scholarship with a critical approach to strategic communication. It draws inspiration from critical work on strategic communication that highlights tensions between strategic control and democratic/public accountability, between organizational self-presentation and the communicative conditions of trust, legitimacy, and pluralism. It also engages contemporary crisis-communication scholarship through the new edited volume Communicating in the Face of Global Crises: Organization, Strategy, and ‘Doing the Right Thing’ (McClellan et al.), which foregrounds the ethical, organizational, and societal stakes of communication amid global crises. Core readings are complemented by philosophical and sociological works on resilience that emphasize culture, power, and uncertainty as central to resilience thinking.

Poslední úprava: Konrádová Marcela, Mgr., Ph.D. (06.01.2026)

Literatura

Arora-Jonsson, Seema. "Does resilience have a culture? Ecocultures and the politics of knowledge production." Ecological Economics 121 (2016): 98-107.

Eiríksdóttir, L., & Pallas, J. (2024). Practicing Uncertainty as Resilience. Filozofia, 79(10), 1159-1173.

Holloway, J., & Manwaring, R. (2022). How well does ‘resilience’ apply to democracy? A systematic review. Contemporary Politics, 29(1), 68–92.

Koubova, A. (in press) Fenomenologie žitelného života: resilience, rezistence a response.

McClellan, J. G., Cassinger, C., Penttilä, V., & Porzionato, M. (Eds.). (2025). Communicating in the Face of Global Crises: Organization, Strategy, and ‘Doing the Right Thing’. Taylor & Francis.

Raetze, S., Duchek, S., Maynard, M. T., & Kirkman, B. L. (2021). Resilience in organizations: An integrative multilevel review and editorial introduction. Group & Organization Management, 46(4), 607-656.

Poslední úprava: Konrádová Marcela, Mgr., Ph.D. (06.01.2026)

Sylabus

Course format: four lectures + four seminars

The course is structured as four lecture–seminar pairs. Each lecture introduces a conceptual lens; each seminar translates that lens into empirical work through student-selected texts and cases from the Czech context.

Lecture 1: What is resilience?
A genealogy of the concept and a critical discussion of its uses and abuses in contemporary governance and strategic communication.

Lecture 2: Strategic communication in a crisis ecology
What risks and crises must contemporary strategic communication be prepared to engage—misinformation, failing democracies, war and propaganda, ecological disruption—and what ethical problems follow.

Lecture 3: Resilience, entropy, and panarchy
Resilience as multi-level dynamics: breakdown, reorganization, and adaptation across intertwined systems; communication as both stabilizer and amplifier of disorder.

Lecture 4: Strategic communication and the practice of uncertainty
Resilience as judgment under incomplete knowledge: how communicators can act responsibly without claiming certainty they do not have, and how organizations can “do the right thing” when legitimacy is fragile.

 

Seminar pedagogy: “Find a text, find a Czech case”

Each seminar follows a consistent format designed to build student agency and empirical sensitivity. Students bring:

1. one self-selected text (academic article) relevant to the lecture theme, and
2. one Czech case/example (a communication controversy, campaign, crisis episode, institutional response, policy debate, or organizational initiative).

Seminars focus on collective analysis: mapping problem framings, identifying power and accountability dynamics, comparing resilience narratives, and debating ethical trade-offs. The aim is to develop the capacity to diagnose crises as contested communicative situations—and to resist the pull toward simplistic solutions.

Poslední úprava: Konrádová Marcela, Mgr., Ph.D. (06.01.2026)