Kitchen table conversations as a social technology for place-based disaster preparedness

Disaster preparedness frameworks typically privilege territorially defined communities and household-level responsibility, obscuring the relational dynamics through which preparedness is often enacted in practice. We argue that preparedness is better understood through what we term relational communities of place: socially connected and evolving networks whose relations are shaped by place-based knowing yet not necessarily confined to geographic boundaries. Drawing on lived experience of Australian bushfires, we developed and tested kitchen table conversations (KTCs) as a social technology for grassroots social technology for disaster preparedness. Through six phases spanning informal household discussions to structured conversations in fire-affected New South Wales, KTCs supported the co-design of preparedness grounded in lived, embodied and relational knowledge. Our findings show that preparedness emerges through trust, reciprocity, shared sense-making and practical coordination within relational communities of place – dynamics that formal interventions often struggle to engage. KTCs facilitated the translation of lived experience into staged, threat-responsive materials while also creating space for psychological processing and informal learning. Sustaining such grassroots work, however, requires significant time, emotional labour and resourcing. We argue that disaster management policy must move beyond territorial notions of community to recognise, support and resource relational forms of preparedness already operating within and across places.