Resilience Programming Research Articles

Hidden transcripts of resilience: power and politics in Jamaican disaster management

This paper draws on assemblage theory and post-colonial theories to analyse the politics of community-based disaster resilience. Through a case study of community-based disaster resilience programming in Jamaica, I unpack the biopolitical strategies practitioners deploy in assembling cultures of safety and fashioning resilient subjects. My analysis draws out two juxtaposed forms of resilience that circulate within Jamaican disaster management and are not reducible to the interests of specific social actors: neoliberal and subversive resilience. While both rely on the same categories of self-sufficiency, responsibility and freedom, the latter operates through qualitatively distinct state–society relations that facilitate rather than problematise local populations' adaptive capacity. Assemblage theory introduces a new ethos into resilience thinking that is sensitive to the contemporaneous multiplicity and indeterminacy of resilience, and the possible ‘hidden transcripts’ of resilience that subversively resi...

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

AbstractThis paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.