Okay, I guess we can go ahead and get
started. Thank you, everybody for coming today.
Thank you so much to Katherine for inviting me to
facilitate a conversation today on the topic of resilience as
part of the Intersections series, which examines questions about
injustice and the built environment. Just by way of
introduction, my name is Jennifer Lawrence. I'm a visiting
assistant professor here in the College of Architecture and Urban
Studies. I have the pleasure of inviting
three wonderful colleagues today to present their work. And
I'll just do a brief introduction of them so that
we can have plenty of time for them to present
their research and their work and plenty of time for
you guys to also ask questions. So the way
the panel will work today is basically each of our
presenters will have about 10 minutes to go through some
of their research and their contemporary work on
resilience or related to resilience. And then we'll open
it up to all facilitated conversation. And I would
just ask you guys, um when you ask questions
, please introduce yourself because we want to know who
you are as well. I also just wanted
to talk a little bit about my orientation to resilience
. It's something that I've been working on over the
last couple of years. And so when, Um
when I came over to the college to begin
my new position, Catherine and I had the chance
to talk a little bit about my work and why
I was interested in resilience. And for the last
three years, I've been at the center of the
Global Forum on Urban and Regional Resilience here on campus
, which was the center that was set up to
think about how communities cope after crisis and how do
we come together in the wake of crisis, whether
that's financial crisis, environmental crisis or all of these
social crises that we're dealing with simultaneously. And so
I became really interested in thinking about the conditions that
create the need for resilient subjects in the first place
. So we often herald resilience as a desirable quality
. We think about people or places as resilient as
some someone that's overcome something, our place that's been
able to overcome something. But what we've failed to
examine a lot of times is why those people were
put into a vulnerable situation in the first place.
And so that's where my research fits in. Try
to examine the underlying conditions that are creating the need
for resilience in the first place. And so it
sort of gets onto the front end of that.
I may try to infuse some of that
into the conversation, as I facilitated after the presentation
, so we'll just go into the order that the
panels they're sitting in, we have Simone Franze,
who is a doctoral student in the Planning,
Governance and Globalization program here at Virginia Tech.
Dr. Erika Meitner, who is an associate professor
in the English department. She's a poet who draws
on her own life experience and also works to examine
some issues between climate change, sea level rise in
particular and the built environment. And finally, we'll
end with Dr Rebecca Hester, who is an assistant
professor in the Science, Technology and society program,
and her work examines basically the intersection of biomedicine and
the life sciences with a look into critical security studies
. So we're gonna have a wide ranging conversation today
that will examine a lot of different facets of resilience
and I think that one of the things to keep
in mind is that there are multiplicity of meanings,
of resilience, and that multiplicity has enabled us to
think about resilience in a much more broad scope.
On that also is something that I've been I've had
the pleasure of working on over the last couple of
years, and we just got this in the mail
last week, which talks about how resilience has really
become like a machine. And so this book uses
the analogy of the urban growth machine to think about
how resilience has proliferated on discourse and toolkits,
um, in public policy settings, etcetera. So
resilience has really become a way for us to think
about an inoculation against vulnerability. But the question is
, should we? And so let's think about that
as we hear from our Panelists today. So if
you could just join me in welcoming our Panelists.
g\Good evening or good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for
being here. I'm as was introduced, Simone
Franze. I'm a doctoral student, uh
, school of public and international affairs.h
What I'm gonna talk about today is my research
on the international trade system, and how resilience can
be used as an analytical lens to understand the unfolding
dynamics of the trading system. You all might have
heard about the Trump administration introducing tariff in the 2018
this year, renegotiating trade agreements that have bean
negotiated during the last 20, 30 years. Um, I'm
not gonna bore you with all the numbers, but
that's quite a change that's going on in the trading
, um, political system. Where Trump is - the
Trump administration is promoting changes that are quite disruptive.
And what I'm gonna argue is that we can think
about the trading system from a resilient perspective with analytical
lens. That's resilience and in order to understand these
changes, um, I'm a political scientist by
background. And, uh, I just wanted to
say that when I came to Virginia Tech to work
in the same research institute as Jennifer Lawrence,
I was also a little bit skeptical about resilience.
I knew a little bit about the concept from the
planning or environmental perspective, but I didn't grasp really
How it could help me to understand the dynamics
from the political scientific perspective, but bear with me
that this can be fruitful. Um, I'm just
going to read what a thing Resilience is as an
analytical lens. In this respect, resilience is the
process off alternate adjustment adopted by a society or an
individual in the face of endogenous or exogenous shocks
. So if we think about these changes that are
brought upon the system, buy a new administration like
the one that we had in the last two years
, then we can think about the whole system as
impacted by these, uh, exogenous shocks. And
what we're seeing right now is basically a process or
pattern other than f122
to show you a little image here to relate to
my research also with the built environment. Since,
uh, one of the topic of this conversation is
the built environment and what you see there, it's
a building - I have to read because I don't remember
all the details - but it's called The William Rapper
Center is in Geneva, Switzerland, and is the
house of the World Trade Organization today. But it
was a long story. It was built
in 1785. It was renovating in 1894
and it started being part of the international political system
, Uh, in 1923 when it was dedicated to
that border off the International Labor Organization and then,
from 75 to 95 exhausted the General Agreement on Tariffs
and trades. After that it all, said
the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And since
1995 it is the house of the World Trade
Organization. Why am I showing this image is because
, as the building us different life and it's gone
through different, um, institution as the headquarter of
different, different institution, we can think about the
international trading system in a similar fashion where you have
changes and evolution going on and there is a process
with shocks that affect what's inside the building and out
. The system is organized to put trading system is
organized. Yeah, um, in my research,
what I've seen is that resilience can actually be exactly
this analytical lens that makes us understand some changes
. What I study is the impact of trade agreements to
political authority with political authority. I mean the capacity
to make legitimate and binding decision for a collectivity so
president or Congress as political authority because it can make
this decision for a collectivity. And they look at
how this political authority has been changing or who has
the political authority has been changing depending on the
number of trade agreements that a country sign. And
what I observed is that there is some shift here
, and the more trade agreements a country signs, basically
, the more we see that there is a increase
in what I define as shared rules. So the
more sub national governments also acquire political authority not in
substitution to another government but in complementarity with it and
the results of my research basically show that this analytical
lens of resilience is actually powerful to make us understand
how the system is changing. Okay, thinking,
Yeah. So just to conclude. How does
it help us? The analytical lens of resilience to
understand the new changes that are brought upon in the
last two years? Well, if we understand that
the international trading system is also, um, in
a process of pattern adjustment and it's from shocks
, then we can also understand that the challenges that
we have today are not so disruptive as many media
reports, but are mostly, um, part of
a process that's ongoing and over which the system will
react. Uh huh. As I mentioned in my
research, what we've seen is not that there is
a disruption of political authority. I didn't mention
that when the trade agreements started, I fear that
was thereby many media was: well, we're gonna lose
the nation state and there is not gonna be
any more political authority from governments. But it's gonna
be the markets that decide for us.
aWhat we actually see in my data is
that actually there is still political authorities, just
changing and shifting. So the analytical lens of
resilience helps us understand shocks that are brought upon
the system like the trade agreements are brought bringing adjustment
to the system. Thank you so much. Okay
, so next up, Dr. Erika Meitner.
I actually don't have a doctorate. I'm not a
doctor so I'll put that out there. It's okay.
I don't even play one on TV. I'm just
a poet. Um, and I over-slided for
this so I might run through a whole bunch of
slides, but I want to talk about one of
the things that's really interesting to me because I decided
to look up resilience because it's not a way that
I normally contextualized my work. Um, and I
thought it was interesting that there to really different definitions
. One is the capacity to recover quickly from our
adjust easily to difficulties, misfortune, diversity or change
. And that can apply to both, um,
cities, which is part of what I work on
. And people there's a toughness or a buoyancy,
and also the ability of a substance object or strain
body to recover from compression or to spring back into
shape and elasticity, which is a really
physical quality of objects mostly, um
, rather than people. Um, I'm probably gonna
I was gonna say I'm going to drive the video
person nuts by getting up, if that's okay.
Is almost everybody in here an Architecture student?
Yeah, For the most part, raise your hand
If you're an architecture student, Okay, so everybody
pretty much is, or a professor of architecture, so I'm
going to talk a little bit about how my work
also applies to the built environment, because it's something
that I've been working on. In addition to writing
poems from my life. Um, I also work
on larger scale, um, documentary photo text projects
where I'll either go on the road with photographers or
work with their work in order to produce sometimes projects
on commission for magazines, so they'll pay me in advance
and say, Go do this or sometimes projects that
air just for me. And so I want to
talk a little bit about two different projects,
if I have time and read two poems that I'm working on
. One of the projects is in its very early
stages, and normally I would never present on it
. But the topic was so sort of tied to
this that I thought it would be fun to do
that. So so some of the projects I've worked
on over the years is a project on Detroit,
both right before and during bankruptcy and I was
drawn to pictures that I saw of quote unquote the
ruins of Detroit on I worked with photographers Andrew Moore
and Ryan Spencer Reid to produce a piece on commission
for Virginia Quarterly review, where I went into the
city and tried to fill some of the abandoned spaces
with voices of people by interviewing people in the ways
that a journalist or anthropologist might. Another
project I did that I'm going to talk about
If I have time after Miami was B Q. R
sent me back on the road with Ryan to cover
the city of Cleveland during the Republican National Convention in
2016, and that was a really interesting project because
we weren't reporting on the RNC. We were reporting
on the city as a whole. Um, Cleveland
is the second poorest city in America other than Detroit
. And, um, LeBron James had just taken
the Cleveland Cavaliers to the basketball championships a couple of
weeks before we went for the RNC. And one
Of the things I'll talk about if I have time
is how the built environment was changed for this particular
event and what that meant for the people in the
city. But I want to talk about Miami first
because I think that's a really interesting study in both
sustainability and resiliency, with a giant question mark around
it right now. And so I don't know how
familiar people are with with with what's going on in
Miami, I'm going to assume somewhat, um,
but basically the city of Miami is ground zero right
now for climate change and sea level rise. Um
, a 2016 report on the issue from the National
Wildlife Federation estimates that Miami has the most to lose
in terms of financial assets of any coastal city in
the world. Once sea level rise continues to happen
, Um, and it's getting faster than people even
predict. Like even the data in this, um
, is already outdated. Um, the National Climate
Assessment, um, says that global average sea level
will likely rise another 1 to 4 ft by the
end of the century. But there was just a
report that came out that essentially said, It's gonna
be 2 ft and it's going to be much faster
than we think it is. Um, basically,
that would put a good chunk of
Miami underwater. Um, Miami Beach is one of
the lowest lying areas in a state that has the
second lowest, mean elevation in the country, like
that's crazy. The other thing is, um,
and the city of Miami, like parts of it
on the Bayside, are only 2 ft above sea
level, like it's a really low city. When
you look at the horizon. It's flat. It's
crazy. Um, Miami also sits on top of
porous limestone, so there's seawater coming up into it
through the ground. Um, and so for this
particular project that I was working on, I have
been doing a project on gun violence and gun culture
in Appalachia with a woman named Anna Maria Barry-Jester
, who is a public health journalist for the site
FiveThirtyEight. And it turns out you can't photograph and
gun shows. So we were like, What do
we wanna work on? And we both thought it
was insane that there are all these incredible, architecturally
beautiful buildings going up in a city that's sinking,
Um, buildings by Rem Koolhaas's firm, OMA.
Buildings by Herzog and de Meuron, these
incredible cultural and residential buildings that are being built in
a city where the roads are basically
undriveable when it rains and the water is so quickly
becoming undrinkable that the buildings might still be there.
But the city is going to definitely have to adapt
in various ways and has so, um and I'm
taking way too much time. So I think I'm
just gonna get to Miami. But, um,
one of the things we were interested in is this
enormous cognitive dissonance of these award winning architect designing these
strikingly beautiful skyscrapers and cultural centers and condominiums and hotels
that are springing up kind of defiantly in face of
like, factual evidence that, like they're not sustainable
. So what do we do with that? Um
and so essentially the answer was: make an art
project and see what happens. Um, and right
now, we're in the middle of making an art
project and seeing what happens. Um, it's interesting
. I've been interviewing architects, which might be of
interest to you all. I'm definitely not going to
talk about Cleveland. Um, but I've been interviewing
architects, and, um, you know, they
take really different approaches to how they're building in Miami
. But, um, where you have Herzog and
de Meuron who are more phenomenologists and are
building buildings that will be sustainable through climate change.
So I interviewed one of the senior architects in charge
of the Paris Art Museum, which is a really
beautiful building, and I can show you a picture
of it in a second. Um, but then
also OMA which is more like post
humanist. And there's this really interesting quote I found
from Rem Koolhaas while working on this project
? Which means during during, um after he had
been a featured guest in the symposium on climate change
, he has this amazing quote that he said later
that he feels powerless to address climate change. And
this is a quote from him. It's been kind
of really exciting for me to kind of finally not
so much do something about sustainability, but to actually
be incapable of speculating about some of the likely and
some of the already visible effects. And so that
was a really interesting kind of moment. So I'm
gonna ignore Cleveland for a minute and go straight to
Miami. Some of these photos are from
the photographer. I've been working with Anna Maria Barry-Jester
. Some of them are my snapshot. Some of
them are other stuff. Um, so I'm going
to read a poem to end this that I'm working
on the Miami Project, and I was shooting on
a Rolleiflex, which is a film camera
, a big old fashioned film camera where you look
in the top And so the photos that she shot
on the Rolleiflex are square format and we'll talk
about this in the piece I read. But,
um, this is a coconut grove marina where boats
, houseboats from Hurricane Irma that had washed up in
people's yards and on streets ended up compounded.
They had all split in half, and they ended
up compounded in this, um, marina parking
lot That was right across the street from where Rem
Koolhaas's building is, a complex called Park Grove, which
we've been visiting on and off for about nine months
. And so I'm gonna read something in the voice
of a houseboat. Um, this is the Paris
Art Museum that was built by Herzog and Demure.
This is one of my snapshots, not one of
Anna's photos. I feel I should say that because
I'm a terrible photographer, but you can see how
close to the water it is. They elevated it
so that when it does flood only the parking floods
, it's a pretty remarkable building. Um, but
it's still sort of terrifying to think about all of
the art in there and what happens during hurricanes,
even though it's very well protected. Um, this
is the Park Grove complex. These are
renderings of Park Grove. And that's actually a
Bjarke Ingles building that's directly next to it. These
air, like a block from the water. Um
, and this was when we visited the construction site
. They were pulling down the final wall. Um
, it says wash it, come down. Yeah
, cream. But they were pulling down the last
ball of the Coconut Grove Banks so they could put
in this third tower when we were there. Um
, one of the interesting things about Miami is there
in the process of raising all the roads in Miami
Beach. So now some of the storefronts are below
sea level. And these are drains that kind of look
like buildings. Um, this is a a building
they're putting up downtown. That's flooding during Hurricane Irma
on some of the same streets. Um, these
are water pumps that they use to pump water back
into the bay when the streets flood. So they're
taking water from the street, putting it back where
it came from. That's a whole other thing.
This is I'm sort of raising the roads. Um
, sustainability. This is one of the hotels.
It's, uh, Damien Hirst piece of art
. I don't have much time, but the beach
in Dania is eroding. And this is what I
call the lifeguard stand at the end of the world
. The parking lot is directly behind that dune.
The beach erosion is so bad in some places,
Do I have time to read a really fast poem,
maybe? Yeah, I'll just read one really short.
Okay, I'll read one, um, Florida poem.
. So when we were interviewing this guy Bruce,
who was a houseboat owner, and we go around
to talk to everybody construction workers, whatever. Like
whoever will talk to us? Anna
took a picture of him, but it never came
out. And so you'll hear part of his story
. But he lost his houseboat in Hurricane Irma
For those in peril on the sea. Bruce's story.
When we saw the boat graveyard at dinner key
marina behind the tall chain link with no trespassing signs
bolted to it. Anna had to photograph it,
even though the light was all wrong. Midday.
Harsh, short shadows. Everything blown out and over
exposed. We had already moved the car from our
metered spots, so I stayed behind in the driver's
seat to avoid paying for parking twice. I
listened to Spanish radio with the windows down and watched
the recreational boaters in their deck shoes and fiddled with
my phone. And when Anna finally came back,
she told me about the sailboats lying naked on their
sides, cracks in their keels, covered in barnacles and
dried mud, the crushed masts and rusted engines,
the cabins filled with broken dishes and moldy cushions.
She said she met a guy named Bruce with incredibly
lush and slowing 1970s movie star hair. Like David
Cassidy the early years but blonder like Farrah Fawcett,
Bruce lived on his boat for the last 20 years
in the marina. There's a big community there,
live-aboards, But his boat sank in Irma and the
Coast Guard dredged it out and put it on a
barge. He told Anna that they cut all the
boats in half and put them in a dumpster in
pieces and brought the dumpster back to the marina,
where the boats they salvaged from the sea and
sidewalks and pool decks and waterfront yards are
still sitting, halved and displaced in the seminal boat
ramp parking lot behind the Coast Guard fence. Bruce
said he was on CNN with photos of his boat
sinking during the hurricane. When the electricity was out post Irma
. It meant that the elevators weren't working in his
girlfriend's apartment building, so he had to walk up
27 floors and his toe, which had a cut
on it, got infected and had to be cut
off. He lost his toe to the hurricane.
Algún Dia, Someday, was the name of his boat.
He used to rent it out for photo shoots because
it had a busty mermaid on it. The first
photo shoot on it was Sofia Vergara. Before she
was famous for the first edition of Maxim Latin America
He told Anna the shoot took twice as long
as I said it would, and Sophia said to
him, You've been so patient. I'll take a
photo and sign it for you. But when I
asked Anna to show me her photo of Bruce months
later, when she had the film from her
Rolleiflex developed, mostly because I wanted to see his
amazing hair. The frame of him had vanished from
the roll. Okay, thank you Yeah. Okay
. Okay. So I am also a political scientist
by training, but by way of working at a
medical school and now at a tech school, Um
, I mostly work on the politics of the body
, so that's what I'm going to talk about.
The body as built environment. We tend to think
of the body as a natural, um, sort
of bounded at the skin entity that only changes due
to aging or illness or something else. But those
definitions of resilience were really helpful for thinking for helping
us think about how the body is thought today,
not only in medicine, but broadly. So on
the one hand, we think about that sort of
elasticity, the plasticity, the bouncing back, right
. We would call that cure or treatment. On
the other hand, we were thinking about ways to
make the body more resilient, to survive longer,
too, to extend our mortality, our health,
all of the kinds of things that, um,
that we want for ourselves and our parents, our
loved ones is to live long, healthy lives.
So those two ideas of resilience get embedded in our
medical philosophies today. And the way I work with
the concept of resilience of my own work on the
body is to think about it as a politics.
So how is this political idea of resilience, whether
its elasticity or a sort of longevity, get embedded
into the kinds of technologies that we use on the
human body, or even the ways that we understand
the human body today? So I teach a course
called Monster Zombies and cyborgs, and we definitely talk
about this with regard to the course in terms of
medical enhancements, prosthetics, um, all the kinds
of things embedded technologies that we use now to extend
our eyesight or hearing our heart. You know,
the kinds of things that that that medicine is engaged
in now is much more about optimizing our exists,
since about enhancing it and making us more resilient than
it is about curing and treating and bringing us back
to some original state of health. Right? So
, really, whatever restoring us, restoring our health
, it's about optimizing us now. And so that's
one way that I think about it and with regard
to justice, of course, access to the kinds
of treatments that would extend our lives or that would
optimize our lives are not, is not for everyone
, right? This is a very sort of Western
project. It's an expensive project in a nation where
our healthcare is based on a market if you cannot
access the market, if you cannot access health care
in the market, you cannot access these technologies.
And when you do access them, um, often
for people that don't have a lot of money.
Um, medical bankruptcy in our country is the number
one form of bankruptcy, and it stays on your
record longer than any other form of bankruptcy. So
even if you access these technologies that will optimize your
life or enhance your life, and, you've
achieved getting them embedded in you somehow. Oftentimes,
the medical debt is so overwhelming that the quality of
life is diminished because you're constantly dealing with calls from
insurance companies and, you know, creditors and debtors
, you know, trying to get you to pay
your pay your bills. So that's one way that
I think about questions of justice related to the body
. The politics of the body the other way is
with regard to genetic engineering, the life sciences,
which is a whole other side of the field that
I teaching. And I wrote a chapter in the
book that Jen Showed you at the very beginning
that looks at the ways that we're using genetic engineering
to embed a politics of resilience into living beings.
Because we don't know how to solve climate change.
We don't know how to solve the fact that we
are now in a geological force on this planet through
what we call the Anthropocene. So in order to
try to figure out how to deal with it,
we actually are embedding certain kinds of technologies and modifying
our own genetic makeups, our own genomes, so
that we can survive or the converse so that certain
species - invasive species species that are what we
would call vectors of disease like like mosquitoes,
don't survive so that we can live a better
quality of life longer in the face of the kinds
of, um, changes to our planet that we
have induced as human beings. So to give you
an example, um, malaria and dengue are endemic
They are number one killers all over the
world of people of all ages, and for a
very long time we try to deal with malaria.
Dengue as health problems through development and infrastructure. So
public health sanitation gest rid of standing water trying to
deal with populations by, you know, in some
ways trying to provide them medication. But in most
of the ways it was in changing the built environment
so that mosquitoes weren't around or humans were not accessible
to mosquitoes. That project has all been but abandoned.
It's still happening. But in general the shift
in thinking from development and changing build infrastructures because they're
expensive because they're hard to do, has now shifted
to a much more technical fix. A technical fix
at the site of the mosquito itself. So what
we have now started to propose is through CRISPR/Casj9
technology, genetic technology. We go in and
use what they call molecular scissors, and we actually
change the genes of the insects, the mosquitoes, not
only at the level of one mosquito, but
so those changes are heritable. That's what they call
the daisy chain. So what we're trying to do
is get mosquitoes to extinct themselves through reproduction in order
to deal with the question of malaria and dengue.
And so the idea is that we're embedding a resilient
politics in this case, um, some sort of
daisy chain gene modification that will either kill or make
live in particular ways the kinds of species, including
ourselves, that we want to make live. So
, um, folks at M.I.T
. And Harvard called this constructing or sculpting evolution.
So we're actually now tinkering at the level of evolution
against quote unquote natural law at the site of the
body, our body and other species, so that
we can embed a particular form of resilient politics either
to make things survive or to bring them back to
some state that we want them to be in.
So they're not maybe passing on, uh, plasmodium
or whatever it is the malaria vector. And so
that's the other side of this. And of course
, there's justice to this attached to this for me
because I don't know about you all, but I
didn't sign up for an ecology that has these kind
of genetic modifications in them that extinct particular species or
that make live or even create. I was at
a synthetic biology conference in San Francisco a couple weeks
ago, and they were talking about making dragons,
and they had a image of a reptile and a
chicken. And they said, Choose your chassis.
So the idea is that we're using design principles and
engineering principles, and we're using them to design bodies
literally, or to design out certain kinds of species
. So there is that question of justice is whether
we're all signed on to this. Another question is
that from an ecological perspective, when we start to
extinct particular species in an ecology, other species depend
on those species, right? So if we think
about mosquitoes, bats and birds eat them. We
need bats and birds because they also disseminate seeds.
And then that's how forests grow. And we need
the air from forests and on and on and on
. And so we have to think about the ways
that were operationalizing techno fixes at the site of
our bodies in order to deal with a problem that
we refuse to confront, which is climate change or
the problem of the Anthropocene. So I'll stop there
. But, you know, sort of provocative ideas
about the body as a built environment related to justice
. Thank you. Thank you. So a couple
of themes that I can draw together the question of
time and temporality. I think the future is definitely
very present on all of your
work. Uh, Simone, you know, with
regard to trade in the opening up of new channels
of accumulation through melting sea ice, Um, how
we're going to build for sea level change and also
how we're going toe engineer bodies of society to deal
with the increasing chances of disease on that that follow
climate change, especially so definitely a time element.
The element of visibility, all of your work,
I think, definitely works to bring things into visibility
that are often hidden as a result of the way
that we structure particular discourses and policies and society.
And then this idea of intentionality versus effect, I
think that one's a bit more difficult to tease out
because we know what the effect is right. But
in the intentionality is not always, um, always
planned. And, I think, Rebecca, your
work shows that sometimes we don't know what the
risk is that we're engineering into our designing into particular
products or possibility. So those were just some initial
thoughts, but I would like to open it up
to you guys to ask questions or make comments.
And just again, please introduce yourself. So anybody
wanna be the courageous first question asker?. Sure
, yes, in the back. So my name
is [inaudible]
. And I was kind of wondering what your thoughts
are in terms of - when I think of resilience
, it's more of an inherent in quality.
So, yeah, and we're talking about acknowledges inspectors
changing, changing the problems, that's our resilience.
But is that is that really resilient?
In mitigating the problem instead of actually making
the subject more flexible?
Should we collect questions or take them one by one
? Anybody else I've got? Yeah, So that's
a great question. Um, so the idea of
resilience as politics mostly came out of the UK,
started out with regard to the ways that they were
thinking about policies. But what happened from that was
they started thinking about communities and sociality. So
they started thinking about people making people more resilient,
right? And so, in some ways, absolutely
we can say people are resilient, people bounce back.
People make it through all kinds of catastrophes. And
, you know, that's perhaps even part of what
we might even venture to say is what makes us
human part of it right, that we have this
tendency. But the idea that that there's some innate
resilience is in tension with the idea that we need
to actually make people more resilient, right, And
this is part of the politics of it is that
there's a sort of nihilism or skepticism
about the inherent capacities that we have to be resilient
, or even the fact that we need to become
more resilient than we already are as a virtue.
And so the idea is that we're trying to create
people, things, to be more resilient because there's so many
forces in the world that make us
vulnerable. And as those vulnerabilities increase
economically, socially, politically, ecologically, as those
forces continually sort of confront us and we're living in
a world of vulnerabilities, the politics comes at us
even harder that we should be more resilient. So
the terms of resilience have changed, I think
, and so what we mean by a sort of
natural or central resilience has to be bolstered
in the mind of these people who are pushing.
This is a politics because they don't know how to
deal. We don't know how to deal with all
of the vulnerabilities and risk that we're confronting, so
I agree with you. But I also think that
there's not only a skepticism, but there's a perceived
need, given the extreme vulnerability not just of those
the poorest among us or those who are, you
know, having to flee war zones. I mean
, I would venture to say all of us in
here feel like we are continually in an onslaught of
vulnerabilities, of forces that kind of undermine our well
being. So that's where that's where the politics
of resilience comes. And I'll just say one more
thing. People often say to me, I'm a
mom. I am very busy. I have animals
on a farm and you know, and they're like
, Man, you're so strong and you're so resilient
You go and make this and I say, I
don't want to be resilient. I actually don't want
that because that means that I'm living in such vulnerability
and overwhelmed that I'm forced to continually be in this
survival mode and bolster myself and be stronger and stronger
. And so I would invite us to think critically
about what a politics of resilience asks of us and
demands of us as a society. You know,
going back to what Jen said at the beginning that
, you know, putting some emphasis on the forces
that push us to have to think in these terms
is where I would train my energy personally.
Yes, sure
, I want to feel on that. Maybe ask
about the resilience, conditions that human of Europe fabricating
, attempting to produce but the resiliency of other sites
. So whether it's the built environment, natural environment
of natural light being political systems, all these other
types of sites of resilience we're trying. It's uh
[inaudible]
I think of artistic production as a site of
resilience in some ways itself. As someone who's essentially a
teaching artists in the academy. But my work has
looked at, and this sort of dovetails with what
you are talking about. Like most of the communities
and people I speak with when I'm doing fieldwork of
the kind that I'm doing in the cities I'm working
in, um, are often communities that have dealt
with collective trauma because they're underserved communities or collective
trauma to do with very specific elements of being underserved
. So, for example, when I was working
in Detroit, they were closing schools right and left
, and these communities were incredibly traumatized by the
closing of their local schools. Um, and this
idea that they're supposed to be resilient, that kids
are supposed to get on buses that don't come
and take two hours to get themselves to the next
closest public school. There becomes a point where when
you're dealing with communities in trauma, whether it's collectively
over gun violence or because they're just being forgotten
by the system, they're not part of the capital
of the late capitalist system. Um, there's a
certain point beyond which resiliency doesn't work as a structure
That essentially as a teaching artist, I'm going in
and dealing with them. If I'm
teaching a class, I'm helping them write about their
trauma, not necessarily overcome it, but speak
it or speak to it. And I think that
as someone who also grew up in a family
that was deeply traumatized, my grandparents were Holocaust
survivors. And part of the resiliency of that was
generations of figuring out, like essentially 50 years of
figuring out what to do. A suppressed memory,
narrative and trauma. Um, there's a resiliency,
but there's a great cost to that that manifests in
2nd and 3rd generation. I mean, like,
they're even still studying the effects of large scale trauma
of genocide on third generation descendants because it's changed our
very genetic makeup and the way we process sugar or
, you know, other things. And so I
don't think we know yet. Um, some of
the answers to these questions, But I think this
idea that resiliency is, to be like, really crass
, a sort of political, um can be used
as a political bludgeon to say, like you need
to be stronger because we're not going to help you
or serve you. It can be used as another
way to oppress people, I think.
I was going to go in another direction to respond
to your question, and relates to the previous question
on the resilience as an inner and characteristic off
a material or system and I want to underline
that the temporality aspect of resilience? Because when
I look at the political system or if I look
at the building and the resilience characteristic of, this
system or building cannot be understood, understood at a
fixed moment, but only through the time and when
we talk about resilience of the system, to me
it's just a way to understand how evolution of different
shocks impacts the future of this system. So to
make an example, it's with trading system that I'm
talking about. Here we have new shocks coming in
, and there is a fear of the future that
this shock will create effects that we may
not like. And if we look at the system
from our resilience perspective, we understand that there is
a history on the system itself and that the shocks
that they're coming will impact the system. But the
system will react to to these shocks. And I think you can
do a similar reasoning, also, with the
built environment with a building, there is no building
that doesn't have a history. Um, the way
I would answer your question is with regard to smart
technologies like smart cities, smart buildings. Um,
for at least since the 1950s, I think
we have been moving toward a more network centric ontology
, right? Thinking about that and the ways that
the Internet was built in a way that network centric
ontology works is that there are multiple nodes. But
the idea is that they're diffused nodes. So if
one node goes out, the rest will continue to
function. Right. So this idea of resilience is
that you know, whether it's a smart city or
it's a smart environment of any kind. Um,
the resilience of the system will remain even if particular
nodes go out right. So we can think about
that in terms of the built environment with regard to
buildings or cities. But also, our military has
gone to a network centric warfare right after they had
the revolution in military affairs. Um, they are
now operating on a deterritorialized network kind of
vision. So if one node of that network goes
out, the rest of the network remains functional.
So this kind of logic is pervasive and ubiquitous,
so the the idea of resilience infuses not just politics
and policies and bodies, but it infuses the buildings
that we're in, the systems that we use, right
, your smartphones, any smart technology you have,
the militaries we support. All of these things are
operating from this kind of network-centric ontology. And
it is about embedding resilience within the network so that
if we lose one piece of it, the rest
of it will continue to function. Other questions.
Comments? Yes, Everywhere. Yes, I wanted
to comment on network first lines. Think this is
really relevant? Uh, extractive interview passage Exactly how
it continues to survive despite the nature disasters come right
spill in the Gulf. And, um, how
resilience disguised by public care by the politicians is being
to protect the economic stage. Well, being of
the people in the coastal city were, in reality
, a VP B B basically overlooked, right?
Yeah, controlled the entire operation and cleaning up everything
and used things like extremely toxic chemicals high the extent
to which it created this disaster. That was all
the mechanism of resilience to keep the fossil fuel industry
above water while not really caring at all about the
actual resiliency of the communities of extremely ill to do
. I just actually your comment. Thank you.
Yeah, it's your it's your expertise. There s
Oh, yeah. So, Laura, thank you
for your question. I think my research, in
addition to being on resilience, is
on the extractive industries. And that's something that I've
been looking at for, I didn't know, but
my entire life. So, Erica, you mentioned that
you pull on your own lived experience for your research
, and I think that many of us do that
. But we might not always recognize that immediately.
And it did take me a while to understand that
I was looking at the relationship between, um poverty
and massive resource wealth and why those two things coincide
one another in many cases. And so I
worked on the deepwater horizon disaster. Um, that's
part of my PhD study. And what Laura says
is true that many of the ways that this disaster
has been remediated has created second order disasters, especially
with regard to public and environmental health. And this
is something that the Coast Guard and other organizations have
now recognized that the exposure to these so called clean
up technologies are making people incredibly sick. And so
, um, that, I think, certainly highlights
the invisibility of disaster. But also this requirement of
resilience that Dr Hester brought out in her talk on
. And I think that we can see this in
many industries. Certainly. We see it in medical
and military and, um, fossil fuel industries.
And I imagine that many of the industries that you
guys are thinking about as part of your studies
and your professionalization through the university you'll see some of
these same trends. I guess my one
thing that I would like to just leave you with
this, too, to make those forces that require
resilience in the face of vulnerability for
for you to work on bringing those out and your
work and your design and your art to think about
art as a place, um, for resistance and
a place to bring that out. Um, and
just to highlight when this system - what really
in my perspective is, the most resilient
system of all is capitalism, right? Because and
this is something that that is highlighted in all of
these talks. Money was brought out in all of
these talks today, and what continues as part of
the system that requires resilience on the back of vulnerability
is for the accumulation of capital to continue. And
I think that we could see that in many different
sectors. So I'll just leave that there. And
I'll invite our Panelists to have any last words before
we go on, just to thank all of you
for coming to share your work today.
That's how final words for sure. Yeah, any
encouragements for the students? I just wanna echo
what Jen just said in a much more stark way
to say, which pulls from Laura's comment, that when we
are asked to be resilient or when we're promoting a
politics of resilience, what we focus on with the
best humanitarian intentions is to make people stronger, to
empower people, to make them live, better,
to make them live longer. Who doesn't want those
things? But to think critically about what else is
being invisible-ized in that, right so that I can
work harder and live longer means that I could be
a better producer. I could be a better economic
citizen that that Yeah, that my labor can continually
be extracted because I think faster I work harder,
right? And so I don't wanna work that hard
. I will already work 19 hours a day or
16 hours a day, most days. Ask
my kids, I'm, you know, a workaholic.
And in fact, my son said, Mom,
I think you're going to start being a workaholic.
And I don't want to do that. And
so being resilient for me is a bad - is just
a bad thing. And like I think we can
find other ways to operationalize humanitarian projects of living
longer, living smarter. We know that people who
get a full night's rest and who eat well and
Who exercise actually live longer, too. I don't
want some embedded thing that's gonna like a stent in
my heart or something to make me live longer.
I want to just live a nice, peaceful life
. So I would just echo like, what is
being invisiblized in those projects when we're being asked
to continually make people or systems resilient.
Thank you so much. Thank you