Many of the thematic streams at Social Capital 2026 will feature a Distinguished Speaker — an internationally recognised scholar or practitioner whose work is shaping the frontiers of social capital research and practice. These headline presentations anchor the concurrent sessions, offering deep insights and provocative ideas that frame the conversations within each stream.
Drawing from diverse disciplines and contexts, our distinguished speakers illuminate how social capital connects to the major challenges of our time.
Stream: Community Resilience, Preparedness, and Disaster Recovery
Collective Improvisation in the Risk-Sharing Commons during Compound Disasters: The Role of Social Capital and Networks
Dr Arif Sadri, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences, University of Oklahoma
Communities share information about disaster risks in different ways, often resulting in uneven distributions of survival resources, confusion over responsibilities, and communication that fails to foster trust. Understanding how people are connected within a community can reveal who lacks access to resources, who plays key roles, and how information about risks and resources spreads during disasters. This talk introduces a new framework, the Risk-Sharing Commons, to address how people and communities, when facing disasters, navigate the inherent complexities of gathering and sharing critical information and resources. It also introduces the role of social capital and networks for collective improvisation through social-physical coupling, designed to manage information cascades in disaster risk communication and to integrate technical models of infrastructure interdependencies with behaviorally informed insights from local communities.
Arif Sadri is an Associate Professor in the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oklahoma (OU). He received his doctoral training at Purdue University and directs the Transportation, Risk, and Information Commons (TRICS) Lab at OU. Dr. Sadri’s research focuses on how transportation systems critically depend on both social and physical infrastructures in the context of natural and man-made hazards. He develops data-driven, network-based solutions to enhance bottom-up resilience in complex, interdependent systems. His work is funded by several federal and state agencies in the United States, and he recently received the CAREER award from the U.S. National Science Foundation.