Charis – Rural Rivers/Mapping for Resilience Project

Newsletter – Two Weeks in the Rural Rivers Project

It’s been a busy few weeks here at the Rural Rivers project! Students in Dr. Boke’s Anthropology of Disaster class have been hard at work with their community partners, determining what will be the most useful work they can do to support disaster planning, mitigation, and recovery. From mapping culverts in Ludlow, to examining erosion in West Hartford, to revitalizing a floodplain’s vegetation in Cavendish, to collaborating with Vermont Emergency Management on stakeholder outreach for hazard mitigation planning, students are connecting with many different ways of working on and understanding disasters.

These students, as well as community members and visiting scholars came together to offer the first annual Disaster Justice Symposium, facilitated by Dr. Boke and Holly Sullivan (Rural Rivers Research Assistant). With 67 people in attendance on Zoom and in person, joining from California, Louisiana, Puerto Rico, Vermont, New Hampshire, and many other places, we had such a rich and interesting discussion about the directions of disaster justice!

In opening remarks, Dr. Boke shared the following – a few grounding assumptions for the symposium as a whole.

There is no such thing as a natural disaster. Disaster studies scholars have demonstrated, year after year, study after study, that a natural event like a hurricane, an earthquake, or a tsunami does not inherently create conditions of disaster. What creates “disaster” out of “natural event” are the social, political, economic, infrastructural, and affective realities of the place in which it occurs, when it occurs.

We also know it to be true that the most marginalized people in any given social setting are disproportionately profoundly impacted by disaster conditions.

Our third grounding assumption is that we must take a historically deep approach to understanding disasters. As such, we note that current conditions of settler colonialism as well as neoliberal forms of extractive colonial capitalism are at the root of most disaster conditions.

These are long-term problems. They will only have long term solutions, even though the moments during and after a calamity produce impossible urgency. In this space, we have a chance to bring together people with a variety of experiences and knowledge bases to think through what disaster justice means, what directions the phrase takes us in, and what possibilities and limits it may offer. We have a chance to take up big ideas together – like hazard, risk and vulnerability; response, recovery, and mitigation; affect and relational healing; time, space, and livable futures.

All of these are topics on which much has been said, written, documented, livestreamed, and suffered. For the Symposium in 2024, we were joined by 4 panelists who will guided us through some of their perspectives on the work of justice in/around disaster.

Our Panelists

Dr. Melissa Rosario lives, practices, and works in Boriké, otherwise known as Puerto Rico. They hold a doctorate in anthropology from Cornell University, and have been at work bringing together anthropological theory, healing practice, and Indigenous rematriation through their scholarship and their workshops for radical community wellbeing since 2017. They currently co-direct CEPA, the Center for Embodied Pedagogy in Action, with their partner Lau Pat Ra. From their website:

“CEPA is a project that designs and facilitates encounters rooted in practices to heal accumulated trauma from our being. It’s part of a movement of people working to transform their relationships and everyday life to co-create freedom, centering all marginalized peoples especially Puerto Rican women, gender nonconforming, trans, queer folx. To manifest a just future, we honor the wisdom of the earth and of our ancestors as we work to heal.”

In their discussion at the Symposium, Dr. Melissa Rosario highlighted the importance of slowing down, even when things feel urgent, to ground into the next right thing to do, and listening deeply to land and water as teachers – her new book, “Beyond Disaster: Building Collective Futures in Puerto Rico” is available for pre-order.

Dr. Roberto Barrios lives, practices, and works in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he is Professor of Anthropology and Doris Zemurray Stone Chair for Latin American Studies. His 2017 book, Governing Affect: Neoliberalism and Disaster Reconstruction,” is a foundational text in disaster studies, and certainly for our Anthroology of Disaster class. Dr. Barrios’ work, across multiple fieldwork locations, community collaborations, publications, exemplifies an expert ethnographic attention to what stories are told, whose stories are representable, what matters in those stories, and how those stories impact and are impacted by political, economic, infrastructural efforts in disaster recovery.

Dr. Barrios described for us his new project and emphasized the possibilities of transnational solidarities in the aftermath of/recovery from disaster. His attention to affect – that is, feeling that is pre-cognitive but not pre-social – and its role in disaster recovery settings brings together the frames of the “bounded individual” and the “social collective” – these two frames are often taken as mutually exclusive areas of scholarly examination, and Roberto demonstrates that they do not have to be and indeed, they should not be.

Mr. Noah Bezanson also spoke with us about his work on his Masters’ thesis, “Developing a New Interdisciplinary Model for Mapping Flood Impacts for Risk Mitigation”, at the Colorado School of Mines, where he is a student in Humanitarian Engineering and Sciences. Mr. Bezanson’s work brings careful attention to critical communications practices –that is, mapping of floodplains, floodways, and simply, where the water went. Funded by the Natural Hazards Center to complete a field study in summer 2023 with the Rural Rivers/Mapping for Resilience Project, Mr. Bezanson’s work addresses core issues of accessibility and accuracy of flood mapping, and raises important questions about who makes maps, and for whom.

Dr. Sarah Kelly described for us her work on water justice in Mapuche-Williche territory in Chile, as well as the mapping tool she and her students have built -which Rural Rivers continues to use – to check the health of culverts, ditches and drains in Vermont. She is a Lecturer and Research Associate in the Geography Department here at Dartmouth College, as well as the Program Manager for the Energy Justice Clinic at the Irving Institute of Energy and Society, and Associate Researcher, Andes Lab Sur, Universidad Austral de Chile. Sarah holds long-term research relationships with Mapuche-Williche communities in Chile, where she has investigated hydropower, cultural cartography, and Indigenous rights. In 2021, she co-founded the Energy Justice Clinic at Dartmouth College.

This event was made possible by the multiple community partnerships our team holds, which nourish the work – and by our institutional sponsors including the Rockefeller Center, the Ethics Institute, the Sustainability Office, and the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. Most importantly, the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact has served as a hub through which to coordinate not just this Symposium, but also the Anthropology of Disaster class, from which the questions and framings of the symposium grew. Dr. Bryan Duff and the rest of the Center for Social Impact do amazing work to connect students and classrooms with wider community efforts and needs.

Our Information Sheet and Ethical Approach

Our research design starts from grounding in trauma-informed research, and researcher sensitivity to the emotional and social burden of flood-related losses. An ethical stance in the context of disasters must also include the choice for impacted people to tell their stories more publicly.

So, we’re committed to consent practices that include the choice for participants to be named.

When we get to the point of disseminating the results of our research, we’ll invite community input on final written or reported products. Community-accessible and legible knowledge tools and dissemination of research findings are central to this community-forward ethics while also attending to ethical treatment of data.

When we invite folks to participate in the research, we talk through what the project is, what their participation would involve, how we will use the information, and how they can get in touch with us at any point. That information sheet is available here: Info Sheet CPHS Mutual Aid for Flooding Resilience

For the bibliography curious…

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).

Welcome…

…to the Rural Rivers/Mapping for Resilience project, a collaboration across Geography, Anthropology, Earth Sciences, Emergency Management, and Humanitarian Engineering at Dartmouth College and Colorado School of Mines, in coordination with communities in the Black River and White River Valleys of Vermont.

Recent floods in the rural northeast of the United States have tested the area’s social and physical resilience. In the rural Black and White River Valleys of Vermont, locals respond first to crisis with tools on hand – backhoes, bulldozers, shovels, and water pumps, kitchens to make sandwiches for responders, water delivery carts, and more. In this area, people relate to each other with an orientation to helping-your-neighbor; they are used to trying to fix problems themselves.

For historical reasons, some people in this area view state intervention with suspicion, instead relying on community connections to recover from disasters. Differences between formal state response and locals trying to fix the rivers themselves reveal tensions around what it means to respond correctly or appropriately to disasters. Our team studies how these rural communities – in which some of us live and work – respond to overlapping disasters of flood water inundation, poverty, housing scarcity, and a sense of social abandonment.

Our research team has seen that community members, local responders, federal disaster response agents, and others do not have easy ways to communicate before, during, and after flooding. This is in part due to lack of shared language, and lack of adequate tools for collaboration across these different groups. In this project, we study everyday processes of response, recovery, and mitigation work in these river valleys.

We are conducting ethnographic and geographic research to understand this better. We look at land-use regulation and practice during and after floods; and how social forces, economic realities, and technical infrastructure shape the impacts of land use. Through community-based research we focus on how communication, responsibility, and collective community assistance works after disaster. We’re hoping to address communication difficulties by examining how and when different people take responsibility for identifying, fixing, and mitigating disaster-related problems. Based on this research, we’re collaborating with impacted communities to facilitate clearer communication across different groups responding to rural disasters at the levels of towns, states, and the broader region.