Here’s a quick overview of our grounding in some key disaster studies scholarship!
All disaster response, recovery, mitigation, and resilience building, by our definition and that of many others, must be relational and emplaced, and attuned to a local ethics of care (Boulding, 2008; Held, 2006; Lawson, 2007).
Elise Harrington and Aileen Cole characterize three major categories of mutual aid in their recent review of the concept and practice: institutional mutual aid networks; group-based self-help mutual aid; and social movement networks of mutual aid (Harrington & Cole, 2022). They observe that divergent types of “acts of mutual aid may…be embedded in the professional networks of electric utilities or within interpersonal norms of neighbors and friends; all have the potential to reinforce trust” (ibid 163).
Our preliminary research leads us to concur with both the necessity of building trust as part of mutual aid and therefore resilience, and also with the claim that *acts* of mutual aid may occur in multiple relational capacities at once. That is to say, the pastor with the backhoe may be digging out his neighbor’s mud-embedded front stoop because they share locality or faith tradition or both, or something else. We follow other scholars in observing that logics of response unfold along multiple valences, structured by diverse understandings of what “mutual aid” is (Fletcher, 2019; Katz, 1981; Kenney, 2019; Montesi, 2020).
Scholarship on disaster response and resilience has long identified a gap in communications and management practices between local-level communities experiencing disaster impacts and regional, State, and Federal governance systems tasked with supporting response and mitigation.
For instance, Nicole Hart et.al. describe a Houston neighborhood’s responses to Federal efforts to establish Community-Based Disaster Resilience Management (CBDRM), noting that barriers to community members’ engagement with this effort included lack of trust in governments; challenges around convenience of participating in meetings; and a sense that people can “do it [better] themselves” (Duda et al., 2020; Galarza-Villamar et al., 2024; Hart et al., 2024). We rely as well on scholarship that attends to the ways that longer-term structural inequities create the conditions for risk to human life, limb, and dignity—in brief, forms of “slow violence” (Hoffman & Oliver-Smith, 2002; Nixon, 2011; Voyles, 2015).
We draw on these scholars to frame our work in the Black River watershed as an accounting of what Sarah Kelly calls slow water disasters, punctuated by intense spikes in the experience of disastrousness (Kelly, 2021).
Like these scholars, our work identifies such gaps between formal and informal responses to disastrous events and attempts to close those gaps (Li et al., 2019; Ullberg et al., 2023; Wukich & Mergel, 2015). We also seek close gaps between agencies and people of different disciplinary training (Reddy et al., 2024). As many observe, it has been methodologically challenging to close such gaps (e.g. Birkmann & von Teichman, 2010)—our map is a novel approach to this problem. We combine local knowledge with Town, State, and Federal knowledge in the multiscalar manner identified as necessary by the 2015 Sendai Framework (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015).
