Category: Background

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

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). 

…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.