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Roberto Barrios on how disaster researchers and practitioners on terms (disaster, upheaval, complex emergencies)

Kim Fortun
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From Roberto: I took the liberty of reaching out to the disaster research and practitioner community via the RADIX listserv to see what their thoughts are on the inclusion of war and terrorist attacks within the category of disasters. In my query, I specified that my interest was in the ways academics, and particularly anthropologists, thought about this issue in theoretical/analytical terms. I was hoping to make a clear distinction between the inclusion of war and attacks in policy, as that may follow more a vital systems security type of governmental justification, but it is interesting that, in their responses, the respondents moved back and forth between academic and governmental definitions of disasters. One comment was particularly insightful, bringing up alternative concepts other than disaster that may be more inclusive. People like Katiana Lementec, for example, has used the term "upheavals" to bring disaster scholarship and development induced disaster/displacement like the building of the Three Gorges Dam. One respondent brought up "complex emergencies," and we could also include "crisis" as one of the more inclusive terms, but these terms also bring with them the baggage of ignoring the historical political ecology or longue durée of catastrophes and reducing our focus to the immediate emergency. I asked those who replied if I could share their thoughts with the Disaster STS group and they agreed, so I copied and pasted their responses in the word document that is attached.

disaster in history and futures

Kim Fortun
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  • Disaster governance -- and legitimation of particular modes of governance -- has been different in different historical periods and settings. Historian Michele Landis Dauber (year?), for example, describes how New Dealers had to frame the Great Depression as a disaster -- “afflicting citizens through no fault of their own” - in order to secure and legitimate federal aid to those in need. Focusing on more recent developments, John Hannigan, describes how “a humanitarian aid model for dealing with disasters became widely accepted in international affairs during the 1970s and 1980s; faltered in the 1990s; and is currently being challenged by a new approach to disaster management wherein risk management and insurance logic replace humanitarian concern as guiding principles” (2013, 1)" (quoted in Fortun et al. 2016) 

  • While organized to address immediate needs, disaster response often lays ground for enduring structures of different kinds. A literally concrete example is how temporary housing for disaster survivors often becomes permanent housing, though under-designed for this. A more general examples is given by MIchale Landis Dauber in her description of the way federal aid to people in need during the Great Depression in the United States laid ground for a truncated and compromised form of the welfare state that we still live in -- turning on “suspicion that those in need are reasonable for their own deprivation.” 

Email exchanges between Roberto and Vivian

vychoi
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Roberto:

Perhaps this piece by Paul Farmer et al. on the compounding of the cholera epidemic and earthquake in Haiti gives us some food for thought? Thinking about transnational STS and critical disaster studies, it may be worthwhile to discuss how COVID is compounded in places that are still recovering from or experiencing other kinds of disasters. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3104956/Vivian: I have been interested (not surprisingly) of how the pandemic has been framed, in particular, as a war, an "invisible enemy," something that requires some external or bio-technical solution or shifts blame -- in disasters, of course, we know this happens (e.g., framing disasters as merely "natural" ).  Celia Lowe's article on the pandemic that never quite was (H5N1) I like -- asking questions like for whom is biosecurity? And illustrating how geopolitics plays in anticipatory pandemic responses.  I have attached that piece.  There is another piece that I have been interested in: The State, Sewers, and Security: How Does the Egyptian State Reframe Environmental Disasters as Terrorist Threats? by Mohameed Rafi Arafin, in AAAG.https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1497474. The other aspect I have been trying to think through, which maybe already came up in the anti-blackness/rebellious mourning call: I have been thinking a lot about how George Floyd tested positive for COVID-19, how this is a compounded disaster: antiblackness, institutionalized racism, and the pandemic. I don't think that anyone would argue against the notion that the pandemic is a disaster, but what about it is disaster?  I like thinking about disaster as capaciously as possible.  I have started reading Christina Sharpe's "In the Wake," in which she talks about slavery, black subjection, colonialism, terror as disaster. Perhaps this would be a timely piece of work to add to disaster literature? The first chapter is available on Duke UP's website: https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-0-8223-6294-4_601.pdfRoberto:I think another piece that might go well with this group of readings is Lakoff and Collier's "Vital Systems Security." I am pasting a link to it below. Andrew Lakoff also did a talk for the Italian Society for Applied Anthropology on the pandemic recently. The talk is up on Youtube. I am also pasting a link to it.https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273911201_Vital_Systems_Security_Reflexive_Biopolitics_and_the_Government_of_Emergencyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhkublz7vJw&fbclid=IwAR2k9x_oNu9YR_YDuI98oSzn5w7PoTjPa0JMI7MBkuwKxYJarSCXD7MMvewAlso, I have recently co-authored a piece that will come out in Human Organization about disaster anthropology and COVID 19. The contributors to that article included Virginia Garcia Acosta and AJ Faas. Although the piece is not available for circulation yet, here are some questions that came up during the drafting of the article: 
  1. Disaster anthropologists have long defined disasters as diachronic processes that enhance the socially disruptive and materially destructive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological "accidents," and epidemics. One question to ask however, is whether we must give special consideration to the way viruses manifest agency in comparison to say hurricanes, earthquakes, or toxins or radioactivity released during technological accidents. Do we draw analytical blindsides by reducing pandemics to simply another kind of disaster? What special methodological and theoretical considerations must we keep in mind when examining COVID 19 from a disaster anthropology perspective? 
  2. Following up on the question above. In many instances, governmental, non-governmental, and inter-governmental organizations engage in a division of labor that separates responsibility for disaster management from pandemic management while, in other instances, an organization may be charged with managing both. When dealing with COVID as a transnational phenomenon, what agencies are involved in its mitigation and how do their legal and policy jurisdictions factor in to their ability to handle the pandemic? 

Roberto:

Also, just thinking about the general historicity of the branch of disaster anthropology I was trained in (which we could say is the Susanna Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith branch of the field that is heavily invested in political ecology and vulnerability theory), a lot of folks see O'Keefe et al's 1976 article as foundational. What is interesting here is that these critical geographers used a comparative approach at the level of the nation as the ground for making their core argument. So there may be some room for discussion there in terms of the Disasters STS group wanting to transcend national level data. Here's the citation for that article: O’Keefe P,Westgate K,Wisner B. 1976. Taking the naturalness out of natural disasters. Nature 260:566–67Oliver-Smith, who is credited with bringing political ecology and disaster anthropology into conversation also credits the work of a Latin American and British network of geographers, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists called La Red with creating the formulation of Marxist analysis that became foundational of the vulnerability shcool of thought. Andrew Maskrey and a group of Latin American researchers including Virginia Garcia Acosta, Gustavo Wilches Chaux, and Jesus Manuel Macias, among others collaborated on this volume, which precedes Oliver-Smith's and Hoffman's The Angry Earth and deserves a good bit of the credit for what became the American flavor of political ecology disaster studies in the US: Maskrey A, ed. 1993. Los Desastres No Son Naturales. Bogot´a, Colomb.: La RED, Intermed. Technol. Dev.
GroupFinally, getting back to Lakoff and Collier, I think Ulrich Beck's Risk Society is particularly relevant here. Beck's concern with the ways toxicity and radioactivity moved across national borders (a transnational risk) and the kinds of social movements he hoped would emerge to counteract them may be worth discussing in the COVID 19 context.

Vivian:

VSS and Reflexive Biopolitics goes well with Lowe's piece, because she makes the very good point that the infrastructures that Lakoff/Collier discuss that are at the core of VSS/biopolitical governance are quite different across contexts (and as she goes on to show, in Indonesia).  Beck is interesting, certainly, and is part of a general group of sociologists (including Giddens, etc) that discuss risk/globalization.   

Thank you, Roberto, for the history/roots of Oliver-Smith/Hoffman's work. As an aside, there is always one part of Oliver-Smith's "Theorizing Disasters" from Catastrophe and Culture that I never really understood, which is why he excluded terrorist attacks and war from his pretty inclusive list of disasters. There is no discussion or footnote or anything that I could find!  And, obviously, Kim, your work on Bhopal as a transnational disaster is so helpful too.Roberto: As for your question about why war and terrorist attacks were not included in the OS branch of disaster anthropology, I've heard or read a few comments on the matter, but I can't quite recall where at the moment. The justification runs along the line that there are different "root causes" and different institutions as well as different problematics involved. For example, political conflict can result in refugee movements, which involve a different collections of agencies as well as international accords like UNHCR. Granted, we can make the case that disasters also drive transnational migration, but, if I am not mistaken, the UN Convention does not recognize them as refugees. Maybe that's changed since my refugee studies days back in the 90s. Also, disasters and pandemics are the result of human practices that enhance the socially destructive and materially destructive capacities of geophysical phenomena and viruses, while political conflict and war are seen as the result of political intentionalities. Now this is me badly paraphrasing the justifications which, I agree, may not be completely watertight. Some anthroplogists have explored the relationships between disaster and political conflict, but usually the studies focus on how disasters push a particular historical political ecology over the edge into all out conflict. Sahlins' Stone Age Economics, for example, makes a connection between cyclones, famine, and eventual political turmoil, but the latter is seen as an effect and not as an ontological coeval. Same goes for the Guatemalan Civil War after the 1976 earthquake and there's quite a few other disaster ethnogrpahies that look at social change in the aftermath of a disaster. So there is literature that connects the two but, in some brands of disaster anthropology, war and disaster remain ontologically different. I guess it would make for a good conversation as to the blindsides such a differentiation creates and whether there are useful reasons to maintain it. Something that comes to mind in this case is Mitchell's Can the Mosquito Speak, where he looks at malaria epidemics and WWII in Egypt as intimately entangled, and we could certainly say the same about war and disaster in many cases. Also, a little footnote that may not be relevant: When Oliver-Smith was at the University of Florida, he worked closely with Art Hansen, who specialized in refugee movements. Perhaps some of this differentiation is the result of an academic division of labor from those days? That might be pushing it. I do think in general, a lot of the disaster anthropologists from this branch of anthropology would defend the differentiation they make on the grounds I listed above which, again, may have faults worth discussing. Finally, it is worth noting that many disaster anthropologists do recognize the history of militarized disaster response in the US, which goes back to Collier and Lakoff's Vital Systems Security, but it seems they separate terrorism, war, and disasters because of their different "root causes."PS - I guess the issue of war, terrorist attacks, and disasters being ontologically coeval gets to the heart of what kind of anthropology we want to do. One of the issues I have with political ecology and vulenrability theory is that they remain soemwhat unreflexive about their own modern epistemological vantagepoint. So, to a great extent, these kinds of disaster anthropology begin with certain predetermined ontologies as an analytical point of departure. I guess we could think of other kinds of anthropology where ontologies are not analytically predetermined, but they constitution is explored over the course of the ethnogrpahy like Mol does in Multiple Ontologies. Someone who comes to mind is Mara Benadusi, who has an article in Economic Anthropology about oil refinery development as disaster. The case here is that, while petrochemical development may not fit certain narrowly defined ideas about what a disaster is, what matters is that her interlocutors mobilize disaster discourse to speak about its toxic effects.Vivian:Yes, I like thinking of the disaster as being multiple (pace Mol).  In my own research in Sri Lanka, the government has, with the UN funding, developed their Disaster Management Act in 2005, following the Indian Ocean tsunami.  Specifically, the Act and much of the work undertaken by the post-tsunami established Disaster Management Centre focused on mainstreaming of "Disaster Risk Reduction" (preparedness rather than response -- this is also the management orientation that Lakoff/Collier discuss in the context of the US).  In Sri Lanka, everything from tsunamis and earthquakes, to fires and civil strife and terrorist attackes are all consider "risks" under the purview of the Disaster Management Centre.  The former Minister of Disaster Management would regularly refer to Sri Lanka's decades-long civil war as a "human-made" disaster, when speaking about mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction in the country. In light of my own experience, I always struggled with OS's exclusion of terrorist attacks and war!

1619 Project

ramah
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This may not be the right place to post/share this, and I am happy to delete or move it! But I wanted to make a plug for the 1619 Project, and this post in particular, as helpfully complementing some of the other readings (such as McKittrick and Moore et al) on America's plantation history.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slavery-capital…

Hazardous waste work, race, and making disaster "professions"

ramah
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I began my research for these field notes by thinking about what kind of labor becomes available in the context of disaster relief/climate change? In my teaching this week, I have been talking about Cyclone Idai and mold as an example of one of how disasters unfold over different temporalities, as in Kim’s work, and via ‘aftershocks’ (Bonilla and Lebron 2019). Thinking about mold got me googling respiratory infections/respiratory health in New Orleans, which lead me to various sites that offer hazardous waste worker training programs (including under the auspices of environmental justice/community development work - e.g. http://www.dscej.org/our-work). This seems one example, among others, of how exposure to environmental harm is transformed into new sites of professionalization. This called to mind discussions of risky labor in the context of disaster, such as in Fortun 2001 or Petryna 2002, and to the centrality of respiration to thinking about anthropocenic processes (Kenner 2019). It highlighted how that transformation of geographical exposure into professional opportunity is then refracted via race and class; while some become hazardous waste clean up experts, others become climate change experts and professionals, who deploy expertise in the wake of other storms. Other accounts (https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2018/03/06/meet-the-refugees-fighting-for-the-future-of-new-orleans/) highlighted specific communities, such as refugee communities, as key sites of resistance to energy infrastructures including a new gas plant, which is being constructed in a FEMA-designated high-risk flood zone. This short stint of googling also lead me to a number of studies of respiratory health, many using spirometric readings to calculate the impact of exposure (for instance to remediation workers involved in cleaning after Hurricane Katrina) (eg. Rando et al 2012). Having recently read Lundy Braun’s book about race and spirometry (2014), these accounts highlighted for me how racialization is built into these processes in multiple ways: not only does race (along with class, professional background, geographical situation, etc) shape who is exposed and in what ways, it also shapes the how health and harm are measured and made visible in this context.Reference:Rando, Roy, John Lefante, Laurie Freyder, & Robert Jones. 2012. Journal of Environmental and Public Health. https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jeph/2012/462478/

Where/whether to place human mobility in thinking anthropocenically

ramah
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Is there a place for thinking about the relationship between the governance of human mobility and anthropogenic processes in Louisiana? Reading the Andy Horowitz piece about Hurricane Harvey and the McKittrick piece about plantations got me thinking about the governance of human mobility as central to how New Orleans, and especially storms, are narrated. The ways in which mobility is made possible or impeded are central to ’storm narratives’. At the same time, recent news has highlighted how ICE activities have been concentrated in Mississippi, Louisiana, and other parts of the South. As the Southern Poverty Law Center notes, "The South is both a destination for new immigrants seeking security in the U.S. and a staging ground for deportation.” Louisiana - although perhaps not New Orleans - seems to be a key site in which these processes are visible. For instance, a report on NBC suggested that, “the number of detainees in facilities contracted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Louisiana and Mississippi surged from just over 2,000 at the end of 2017 to more than 8,000 as of July. That’s nearly four times as many as were detained in the two states in November 2017, the numbers show. Louisiana, with a population of more than 6,500, now has the largest population of ICE detainees of any single state apart from Texas.” One reason for this increase in numbers is financial. According to the SPLC, "The South, which already has some of the highest rates of incarceration in the country, is the bargain basement of immigration detention. Facilities charge among the lowest per diem rates in the country in order to land Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracts that can create jobs for communities, revenue for municipalities and profits for private prison operators, no matter the long-term cost. It’s an approach that flows from the South’s long history of looking to prisons filled mostly with people of color as a way to build local economies – a history that includes chain gangs and programs that “leased” prisoners to companies for work. Today, immigrant detention is but the latest chapter in that history” https://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-south). Yet as this quote suggests, this mode of detention is also historical, and that history seems to play out in a number of ways. Facilities used to detain migrants have often also been used as prisons (including the La Salle detention center in Jena, Louisiana), for instance. But it seems that tensions around the notion of New Orleans as a "city of refuge” (Munyikwa 2019) are long-standing. Even as today, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports highlighted Cuban immigrants/asylum seekers, so too are tensions over racialized Caribbean migration longstanding. In the aftermath of the Haitian revolution, New Orleans was a kind of “flashpoint” (Kazanjian 2003) for tensions over migration and race as both French settlers from Haiti fled to Louisiana and as Afro-Creole refugees were expelled from Cuba. One report of the 1809 migration describes how “in Louisiana, as lawmakers moved to suppress manumission and undermine the free black presence, the refugees dealt a serious blow to their efforts.” http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 These are all clumsy linkages, and I’m not sure I want to draw historical analogies across contexts about which I have only cursory knowledge, but it seems to me that there are linkages or repetitions of connections between labor, environment, and human mobility that for me provoke questions about the relationship between anthropocenics and regimes of human mobility and carcerality (beyond just the notion of ‘climate refugees’). Resources consulted: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ice-detainments-surge-mississippi-louisiana-alarming-immigration-advocates-n1042696 Southern Poverty Law Center & National Lawyers’ Guildhttps://www.splcenter.org/20161121/shadow-prisons-immigrant-detention-southhttps://www.splcenter.org/news/2019/04/10/cuban-men-thrown-louisiana-prisons-despite-legal-asylum-requests http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302584551566978728483?migration=5&topic=3&bhcp=1 https://www.theadvocate.com/gambit/new_orleans/news/the_latest/article_8687dfba-a127-5bb9-9635-25502c2916dc.html https://nolapsc.org/human-rights/ Munyikwa, Michelle. 2019. ‘Up from the dirt’: Racializing Refuge, Rupture, and Repair in Philadelphia. Dissertation submitted to the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. 

Mitigation, Extremes, and Water

weather_jen
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META: Water seems to be one important medium through which NOLA envisions the “impacts” of the Anthropocene—scarcity, abundance, temporalities and spatial distributions, management of, and hazards that emerge in its context. Less is said about the causal or attributional aspects of the Anthropocene. How might water function as an entry point into the assemblages of local anthropocenics?

I found the NOLA Hazard Mitigation Plan for 2018, which frames the impacts of the Anthropocene as an intersection of weather extremes amid climate change and evolving vulnerabilities of its people. Four of seven items in the executive summary note water as central to local interventions: flood awareness, flood repair, flood mitigation, flood infrastructure. Too much water or water in the wrong places and the aftereffect of water on infrastructure and lives. One expression, then, is preparedness.

MACRO: Mitigation is an interesting analytic for the Anthropocene. In the US mitigation plans are shaped by the 1988 Stafford Act (which amended the 1974 Disaster Relief Act). Constraints on communities come through rules, regulations, policies, (dis)incentives, and surveillance by state and federal authorities. Much of this is bound by economic and administrative discourses.

Goals are set in this document—broken out by timelines, activities, priorities, and capabilities. Another expression is classification of anthropocenics by subfields and accounting metrics. How do we measure progress and what is deferred to the future, 5-10 years out from today, a goal that has no tangible accountability but is named and acknowledged. What are the practices of naming, responsibility, and making (in)visible in the Anthropocene?

BIO: One new initiative, Ready for Rain, in particular is of interest to me as it highlights the more neoliberal vision for how the public should self-regulate risk and mitigate harm. I hear this as an extension of a government agency program to make the nation Weather Ready. Other bullets highlight “green” buildings, energies, and infrastructures. These could be examples of how the city envisions the Anthropocene feedback loop of humans changing/planning for climate alterations, which is a fairly typical lens.

Some questions: What does the water do? What does the water know? If we trace water in all its instantiations (e.g. historical water, flow of water, chemistry of water, application of water, temperature of water), what do we learn about the future imaginaries of what NOLA will / could / ought to become?

Kristin Gupta: Ecological Grief and Awareness of Mortality in NOLA

kgupta
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It has become a common refrain to ask how the Anthropocene is experienced locally, but what about corporeally? A growing body of evidence (such as this report from the APA) demonstrates that climate change and its effects are linked to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, PTSD, and a host of emotions including anger, hopelessness, and despair. After Hurricane Katrina, it was estimated that 1 in 6 survivors experienced PTSD, and Harvard researchers found that suicidal ideation heavily spiked. While discussions of these forms of ecological grief (or "ecoanxiety" by psychologists) have largely focused on mental health, economic impacts, and big storms rather than less spectacular forms of ecological change (especially in New Orleans), I am particularly interested in finding how embodied apprehensions of human vulnerability are experienced within the city, and how these have affected approaches to mortality and practices around death and dying.

Aside from talking to more deathcare professionals in the area (something I hope to do once we arrive), I have found rather robust evidence that there is increased engagement with mortality in New Orleans. Death Cafes, which are community gatherings to discuss death and combat taboos that make it an inappropriate topic of conversation, have regularly met for the past two years. Furthermore, preliminary research on funeral homes in NOLA seems to indicate increased interest in green internment options, with multiple organizations framing green/natural burial as a gentle option that "returns the body to nature." While means of casket burial and cremation have historically worked to “correctly” order death and the dead through preservation or means of obliterating the body as quickly as possible (organizing principles that have that rendered death as an interruption rather than a natural process), these endeavors seem to accept to the pressing realities of individual and earthly mortality by framing death as an opportunity for renewal - a sort of "circle of life." 

Although it is less related to my own area of expertise, one of most surprising discoveries I made was that New Orleans was home to the original "Before I Die" wall. In 2013, artist Connie Chung created a participatory chalkboard in an abandoned house with a fill-in-the-blank question of “Before I die, I want to ______.” (The next day, the wall was completely filled with responses.) Iterations of this project are now in over 75 countries. While Chung does not specifically cite anthropogenics as a source of interest or inspiration, its original placement on a building that stood as a sort of monument to ecological devastation makes me strongly think that there are broader connections to be made here about somatic attunements to climate change. 

Isabelle Soifer: Knowledge Economy and Settler Colonialism in the Anthropocene

isoifer
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Based on what I have found thus far regarding narratives surrounding the socioeconomic state of New Orleans, there are two predominant ones I have come across: New Orleans as the “laggard,” the city of play but not work, of poor educational quality, and the other of New Orleans as a "comeback" city shaping to a knowledge-based economy following Hurricane Katrina. The former reminds me of racist stereotypes typically used to describe groups of people deemed not to fit within the white supremacist narrative of progress. The other, post-Hurricane Katrina narrative, is portrayed in the media as a phoenix rising from the ashes, one of the “most rapid and dramatic economic turnarounds in recent American history.” I felt an almost visceral reaction to the assertion of one article that “It would be wrong to say the hurricane destroyed New Orleans public schools, because there was so little worth saving even before the storm hit.” I cannot help but be reminded of “terra nullius,” the “empty land” narrative implemented by colonial powers to seize and control land, dismissing the people residing on the land as insignificant to their broader aim of economic and political dominance. In place of public schools, charter schools are perceived as an improvement—but what of the people who were displaced due to the storm and long to return, yet cannot afford to send their children to a charter school and would be forced to bus their kids across the city? Many people end up not returning to New Orleans as a result. I find it interesting to compare these pre- and post-Hurricane Katrina narratives of New Orleans with the information I find from sources such as this one: a shrinking African American population, fewer young people, less affordable housing, increased segregation, etcetera. What do these demographic changes in the city imply for the “ecosystem” deemed ideal for Innovation hubs? As this article asserts, “New Orleans is making a big name for itself among innovative industries and entrepreneurs and the city’s unique vibe plays a big role in that.” On the other hand, City Councilmember Kristen Palmer asserts that “People have been consistently pushed out…If we lose our people and our culture, we lose our city.” What implication does this “burst” in innovation in New Orleans have for both the Anthropocenics of the city as well as its culture, a culture that is stereotyped as one long “party” with intermittent “emptiness,” as opposed to the realities of the people who have resided in the city for generations, or even the people who moved away after the Hurricane and long to return but to no avail? I am curious to see how education, job training (or lack thereof), and issues of housing feed into the anthropocenics of the city. How do grassroots, social justice and environmentalist activists and organizations (such as this one) perceive the changes in the city following the Hurricane compared to innovation hub technicians and CEOs? How do the social and environmental outcomes of Hurricane Katrina fit within the history of "natural" disasters and climate change in New Orleans? I think it is important to keep articles such as this one central to our focus as we move forward with this project.

Jen Henderson: "An age of resilience"

weather_jen
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Resilience is a term that is widely embraced by many in city management and planning. It holds the positive gloss not just of recovery but bouncing back better. To my ears, it has become one of many anthems of the Anthropocene, a kind of restrained tempo thrumming along through communities that will adapt to climate change (or seasonal-to-subseasonal climate variability post Trump). They will mitigate, innovate, transform, strategize in order to endure unanticipated shocks, both chronic and acute.

NOLA is one of 100 Resilient Cities named by the Rockefeller Foundation sometime in 2013. Like others selected across the globe, the city of New Orleans would benefit from the resources of a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO), an expert in resilience to be hired to work within city governance to develop a strategic plan; NOLA's was published in 2015. Selection of the cities for the "100 Resilient Cities" initiative was difficult, a competitive bid for resources based primarily on a city's recent experience with disaster, usually connected to a weather or climate extreme (e.g. hurricane, flood, etc). Resources were provided via the hierarchy of the CRO, sometimes to hire staff, develop training for the community, and create working groups and to write the stratetic plan. As one former directer of NOLA RC said of this opportunity provided by Katrina, the disaster that qualified NOLA for Rockefeller monies, it demonstrates the need for an the age of resilience. In what ways is resilience measured, accounted for, adjudicated and managed through or in spite of this strategic document? 

The language of resilience includes many terms that I think of as a collective imaginary of utopian preparedness, a vision for a nation that is--in the parlance of the weather prediction community in which I work--weather ready. Through the filter of resilience, then, vulnerability (another problematic term) is eradicated through individual action, community engineering, and adherance to strategic policies like 100RC. Yet how does this image of NOLA, one of "mindful citizenry" engaged in "partnerships" around the city (terms used in their summary video), match with the realities of living in NOLA, today and in the everyday future?

Resilience is also a term widely critiqued in STS and the broader social science and humanistic disciplines. For good reason. Common questions in this literature: What counts as resilience? Who decides? At what costs? Resilience against what? What does resilience elide? How has the discourse of resilience reframed individual and community accountability? What is the political economy of resilience? I'm interested in the discourses of preparedness and planning, and "the eventness" of disaster, as Scott has highlighted many times. But my concern is not just to critique and tear down concepts like resilence (or vulnerability). I worry that we then evicerate common lexicons of hope and imaginaries of the future that do some good. How are we as field campus participants and those who re-envision or reveal the quotidian reflexive? How do we triage the Anthropocene amid our own state of compromise--as scholars, participants in Capitalism, in post colonialism, humans? What are our ethical commitments? How do we make good?