Against Resilience

Scott Gabriel Knowles
Department of History, Drexel University, USA
sgk23@drexel.edu

José Torero
School of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland, Australia
j.torero@uq.edu.au

“Resilience” has swept the conceptual field in the disaster risk reduction world. The startling success of the “resilience” concept reveals a new consensus over the need to attain universal, comparable measures of strength in the face of disaster. Unfortunately, those measures too frequently conform more to […]

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Socio-Technical Resilience – from Panarchy to Boundary Object: the Journey so far….

Stephen Healy
School of Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Australia
s.healy@unsw.edu.au

While the profile of resilience proceeds apace, driven by both its relevance to emergent problems such as climate change and political appeal, questions remain regarding its fundamental character. Foundational tensions with social theory resulting from its origin in systems ecology […]

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Reflexive Resilience: Probing the socio-technicality of disaster management

Katrina Petersen
Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, UK
k.petersen@lancaster.ac.uk

Monika Buscher
Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, UK
m.buscher@lancaster.ac.uk

Information and communication technology (ICT) is often hailed as a means to enhance resilience to disasters. Examples include celebrations of how the cloud supported informational and communicative resilience after the 3/11 Japan earthquake or how ICT brought together a crowd of […]

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Extreme Weather Disasters: Developing an Ethic of Resilience in the National Weather Service

Jennifer Henderson
Science and Technology Studies, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, USA
henderj@vt.edu

Warnings that alert the general public to potential severe weather in the United States originate from one source: the National Weather Service (NWS). A government agency that staffs 122 Weather Forecast Offices across the country, meteorologists in its employ embody its mission to protect […]

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Resilience and the Media: Information Gap in the 3.11 Disaster News Reports

Ryuma Shineha
Faculty of Arts and Literature, Seijo University, Japan
r_shineha@seijo.ac.jp

Mikihito Tanaka
Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University, Japan
steman@waseda.jp

How to fill gaps of media attention between national and local media during and after the disaster? This question is important for social resilience during the reconstruction and recovery process. From our previous study, it was found out that there have been clear differences of media topics between […]

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Post-Fukushima Controversy on “SPEEDI” System: Contested Imaginary of Real-time Simulation Technology for Emergency Radiation Protection

Shin-etsu Sugawara
Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry, Japan
sugawara@criepi.denken.or.jp

Kohta Juraku
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tokyo Denki University, Japan
juraku@mail.dendai.ac.jp

Once the striking news on the crisis at TEPCO’s Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Station arrived, public attention was focused on the magnitude, trend and consequence of off-site radioactivity release. Everyone in the surrounding area to the reactors wanted to have concrete information […]

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How Not to Learn from Disasters: Disaster Reports and Sociotechnical Resilience in South Korea

Chihyung Jeon
Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
cjeon@kaist.edu

Hyungsub Choi
School of Liberal Arts, Seoul National University of Science and Technology, South Korea
hchoi@seoultech.ac.kr

Sungeun Kim
Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea
kim8278@kaist.ac.kr

On 16 April 2014, the South Korean ferry MV Sewol capsized en route from Incheon to Jeju, resulting in 304 casualties. The direct cause of the incident, as it was soon discovered, was an “unreasonably sudden turn” to starboard, which caused the cargo to shift to one side and […]

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An Audience Perspective on Disaster Response

Kurniawan Adi Saputro
Indonesia Institute of the Arts, Indonesia
kurniawan.as@isi.ac.id

This paper builds on three observations. One, in a world increasingly saturated with media, the majority of the public know the disaster through media. Two, the media that people use facilitate two-way communication on a large scale, in addition to their new information storage and retrieve capacity. Three, it has been […]

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Resisting the present, reclaiming the past and reshaping the future: Can data science help Polynesian Islands become more resilient to climate change adverse effects?

Charlotte Cabasse
Berkeley Institute for Data Science, UC Berkeley, USA
charlottecabasse@berkeley.edu

Recent researches have shown that, while resilience has been an efficient performative concept in many disasters management projects, the “back to normal” paradigm on which it relies does not offer a useful framework to think about local population’s claims for social change. For the pacific islands facing […]

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Making sense of space: practices of everyday resiliency in Hyderabad

Diganta Das
National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
diganta.das@nie.edu.sg

India is urbanizing. The state is determined to create modern India through city-centric strategies, making ways for high-tech enclave developments, installation of smart infrastructures and attracting the right people and industries. In the post-1991 liberalization of Indian economy, sub-national states […]

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Drought in the Rainforest: Ships, Cities, and the Slow Disaster of Water Scarcity in Panama

Ashley Carse
Department of Human & Organizational Development, Vanderbilt University, USA
ashley.carse@vanderbilt.edu

In August 2015, the Panamanian government declared a national state of emergency. More than two-thirds of the country was affected by a long El Nino-related drought and the annual rainy season, which usually begins in April, was months overdue. Concern was most acute in the region […]

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The Sidoarjo Mudflow: The World’s Muddiest ‘Envirotechnical’ Disaster

Anto Mohsin
Liberal Arts Program, Northwestern University in Qatar, Qatar
anto.mohsin@gmail.com

Dubbed the “World’s Muddiest Disaster” by Erin Wayman of the Smithsonian magazine, the mudflow disaster in Sidoarjo, East Java, Indonesia is one of the most devastating “envirotechnical” disasters in recent time. A result of a confluence of natural and sociotechnical processes, the catastrophe is […]

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Small businesses and their vulnerability to flooding: Some unique insights on measures of resilience

Bingunath Ingirige
Global Disaster Resilience Centre (GDRC), School of Art Design & Architecture, University of Huddersfield, UK
B.Ingirige@hud.ac.uk

Gayan Wedawatta
School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University, UK
g.wedawatta@aston.ac.uk

Small businesses play a vital role in economic development in terms of generating employment and turnover among a whole range of economic contributions. They also contribute to the societal aspects including social cohesiveness and vibrancy of local communities; thus making vital […]

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Information infrastructure and resilience in American disaster plans

Megan Finn
Information School, University of Washington, USA
megfinn@uw.edu

In our contemporary era of “preparedness,” disaster planning is one technique in attempting to ready society for a disaster (Lakoff 2007). American disaster response plans simultaneously imagine and even prescribe actions, functioning as future-making but not future-determining documents. But disaster response plans […]

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Emphasis on Human Positive Contributions to Safety

Makoto Takahashi
Department of Quantum Science and Energy Engineering, Tohoku University, Japan
makoto.takahashi@qse.tohoku.ac.jp

Masaharu Kitamura
Research Institute for Technology Management Strategy (TeMS), Japan
kitamura@temst.jp

The accident of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) after the Great East Japan earthquake has caused huge and tragic influences on the people. Although accident reports already published mainly focuses on finding individual causes, responsible persons root causes, less attentions […]

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Mapping sociotechnical resilience of energy sector in Singapore: a preliminary representation

Vivek Kant
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
vkant@ntu.edu.sg

Justyna Tasic
Interdisciplinary Graduate School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
TASI0001@e.ntu.edu.sg

The aim of this chapter is to introduce a framework for analyzing sociotechnical resilience and its applicability for Singapore’s electricity sector. Two main streams of thought have addressed sociotechnical systems (STS) and its resilience—social sciences and engineering. Both these approaches […]

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