No Guidebook or Map: the Social-Symbolic Work of Expertise in Action in Post-Blast Beirut

Abstract

Following the August 2020 blast in Beirut, a national grassroots initiative, Khaddit Beirut, came together. KB’s efforts range from co-creating “community-led, evidence-based, and locally-driven” schools and community healthcare centers and rebuilding small and mediate enterprises damaged by the blast, to creating new models for civic activism and engagement and framing and enacting “expertise in action” as a process. All of which had to be done in situated ways commensurate with the constraints imposed by local history and the needs created by the shared experience of catastrophe. Building on Lawrence and Phillips (2019), we explore which forms of social-symbolic work (SSW) the KB undertook, and combined, as it built an ecosystem of cooperation, civic engagement, and organizational and institutional innovation in a geographically and historically bounded context characterized by endemic toxic institutional conditions, political corruption, societal division, and catastrophic economic collapse. We find that amidst crisis, SSW unfolds in each of three main domains, self, organization, and institutional work, but the capacity to perform one kind of work may be contingent on the ongoing engagement in another kind of work. Organization work enabled the self work of claiming expertise and working through trauma, which in turn enabled the organization work of putting that expertise in action. Without both, the institutional work social change appears out of the question. We make contributions regarding SSW, participatory action research, and the use of feminist geography and epistemology in enhancing organizational perspectives on the situatedness of SSW.