Interrogating resilience and exploring the agency within affect
Keywords:
resilience, affect, emotions, disasters, vulnerabilityAbstract
In this article I discuss the role that emotions have on shaping responses to disasters, based on interviews with people who experienced bushfire and flood in 2019 and 2020 in New South Wales, Australia. At the time of the research, state and federal disaster management strategies implored individuals to be self-responsible, independent, and accountable, under the broad concept of ‘resilience’. I argue that resilience rhetoric enforces notions of acting 'stoically' and being self-reliant in the context of disasters, which I locate as being connected with historical understandings of Australian national identity and can be dismissive of emotions, as barriers or non-pertinent in recovery efforts. I problematise the notion of resilience by challenging the presumption that its corollary, vulnerability, and emotions more broadly, belong to a non-agentive category. I consider how emotions can mould both personal and collective responses to disasters and find that experiences of anger, feeling forgotten, and being traumatized can be factors that motivate people to act.
References
Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change. Australasian Psychiatry: Bulletin of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, 15(1_suppl), S95–S98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288
Aldunce, P., Beilin, R., Handmer, J., & Howden, M. (2014). Framing disaster resilience: The implications of the diverse conceptualisations of “bouncing back.” Disaster Prevention and Management, 23(3), 252–270. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-07-2013-0130
Anderson, B. (2015). “What Kind of Thing is Resilience?” Politics 35 (1): 60–66.
Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Butler, J. (2016a). Frames of War : When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso.
---. (2016b). "Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance." In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, 12-27. Duke University Press.
Curti, G., Aitken, H., Bosco, S., and Goerisch, D. 2011. "For not limiting emotional and affectual geographies: a collective critique of Steve Pile's 'Emotions and affect in recent human geography'." Transactions - Institute of British Geographers (1965) 36 (4): 590-594. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00451.x.
Drakaki, M., Gyöngyi K., and Panagiotis T. (2023). "No one stands alone: partnerships for community resilience." Natural hazards (Dordrecht) 116 (2): 1433-1462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-022-05723-y.
Fineman, M. (2023). What Vulnerability Theory Is and Is Not Accessed 19 September 2023 https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/vulnerability/2021/02/01/is-and-is-not/
Frijters, P., Johnston, D., Knott, R. J., and Torgler, B. (2023). "Resilience to disaster: Evidence from American wellbeing data." Global environmental change 79: 102639. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102639.
Gil-Rivas, V., and Kilmer, R. (2016). "Building Community Capacity and Fostering Disaster Resilience: Building Capacity and Fostering Community Resilience." Journal of clinical psychology 72 (12): 1318-1332. https://doi.org/10.1002/jclp.22281.
Hochschild, A. R. (1979). Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure. The American Journal of Sociology, 85(3), 551–575. https://doi.org/10.1086/227049
Jasper, J. M. (2011). Emotions and Social Movements: Twenty Years of Theory and Research. Annual Review of Sociology, 37(1), 285–303. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-081309-150015
Kruger, M. (2019). Building Instead of Imposing Resilience: Revisiting the Relationship Between Resilience and the State. International Political Sociology, 13(1), 53–67. https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/oly025
Leitch, A. M., and Bohensky, E. (2014). "Return to ‘a new normal’: Discourses of resilience to natural disasters in Australian newspapers 2006–2010." Global environmental change 26: 14-26. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.03.006.
Liu-Lastres, B., and Cahyanto, I. (2023). "Are we always ready? Examining event professionals approaches to risk and crisis management and resilience." Tourism management perspectives 46: 101073. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tmp.2023.101073.
Lutz, C., & White, G. M. (1986). The Anthropology of Emotions. Annual Review of Anthropology, 15(1), 405–436. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.15.100186.002201
Makleff, S., Varshney, K., Krishna, R., Romero, L., and Fisher, J. (2022). "Mental Health and Community Resilience among Vulnerable Populations Affected by Natural Hazards: Protocol for Scoping Reviews." Methods and protocols 5 (6): 88. https://doi.org/10.3390/mps5060088.
Rhodes, L.M., and Powers, J. (2022). "Against Resiliency: An Ethnographic Manifesto." Conference proceedings (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) 2022 (1): 202-219. https://doi.org/10.1111/epic.12120.
Rushton, A., Phibbs, S., Kenney, C., and Anderson, C. (2021). "‘She’ll be right’: the place of gendered emotions in disasters." Gender, place and culture : a journal of feminist geography: 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2021.1892595.
Ruszczyk, H. A., Upadhyay, B.K., Kwong, Y.M., Khanal, O., Bracken, L.J., Pandit, S., and Bastola, R. (2020). "Empowering women through participatory action research in community-based disaster risk reduction efforts." International journal of disaster risk reduction 51: 101763. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2020.101763.
Schweitzer, F., Andres, G., Casiraghi, G., Gote, C., Roller, R., Scholtes, I., Vaccario, G., and Zingg, C. (2022). "Modeling social resilience: Questions, answers, open problems." arXiv.org. https://doi.org/10.1142/S021952592250014X.
Shadowen, N. L., Guerra, N.G., Beveridge, R., and McCoy, E.K. (2020). "A resilient research approach: Using community‐based participatory action research in a rural area of India." Journal of community psychology 48 (8): 2491-2503. https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.22429.
Scheff, T. (2015). What Are Emotions? A Physical Theory. Review of General Psychology, 19(4), 458–464. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000058
Soomro, S. (2023). "Building sustainable community resilience and business preparedness through stakeholder perspective." International journal of emergency services 12 (2): 171-185. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJES-08-2022-0039.
Solnit, R. (2009). A paradise built in hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disasters. Viking Press.
Taussig, M. (1992). An Australian Hero. In The Nervous System (pp. 63–88). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203397244-7
Weber, M., Roth, G., & Wittich, C. (1978). Economy and society: an outline of interpretive sociology. University of California Press.
Werner, E. (1989). Vulnerable but invincible: a longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. New York: McGraw-Hill.
