Publications

This paper explores how extreme heat is spatially and temporally imagined and how such imaginaries shape individual adaptation. It draws on a five month ethnography in Manchester – a temperate Global North city. I introduce ‘relative invulnerability’, a perceptual framework in which essentialist global imaginaries position extreme heat as a problem of the ‘Other’, often in the Global South, while temperate Global North contexts are equated with mastery over temporally rare heatwaves. Second, imagined ‘relative invulnerability’ materializes in what residents term ‘common sense’ adaptation – individual, low-cost, short-term and reactive behaviours. Against these findings, the paper first argues that the lived realities of extreme heat remain unevenly distributed – not only spatially, but also imaginatively. Second, perceptions of ‘relative invulnerability’ and a ‘common sense’ approach to adaptation reproduce vulnerabilities along lines already etched by neoliberal governance by obscuring the obligations of global north states for adaptation and reframing heat adaptation as an individual, entrepreneurial endeavour. Third I suggest that ‘common sense’ adaptation is inherently ideological, revealing people’s acceptance of the state’s retreat in climate change adaptation. This paper will be of interest to those interested in the everyday politics of vulnerability, climate adaptation, risk perceptions and how extreme heat is encountered ‘from below’.

Austerity governance is reshaping climate adaptation worldwide, yet its impacts on adaptation at the micro-scale remain overlooked. This paper shifts the analytical lens “downward” to examine how austerity effects individual’s everyday adaptation to extreme heat, contributing to a multi-scalar understanding of austerity and adaptation. Through five months of ethnography in a neighbourhood in Manchester, UK, the paper first identifies how individuals have low ‘value adaptation’, which underpins their engagement in short-term, reactive and low-cost everyday adaptation strategies. Second, austerity’s erosion of everyday infrastructures—water systems, libraries, swimming pools, parks, street furniture and shade infrastructure—has directly diminished everyday adaptive capacity rendering people more vulnerable to extreme heat. And by understanding austerity as a personal condition the paper argues that extreme heat will feel more physically unbearable for people at the sharpest end of the austerity cuts. By bridging debates across austerity and climate adaptation, austerity and everyday lives, and adaptation politics the paper argues that local authorities must reframe everyday infrastructures as essential climate adaptation systems. And everyday infrastructures must be (re)built after austerity if they are to serve as integrated climate adaptation infrastructures at the individual, neighbourhood, and city scales as temperatures continue to rise.

This paper develops a place based framework to explain how families recover from disasters. Using longitudinal patchwork ethnography in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria it proposes that family recovery is determined by a dynamic interplay between ‘etic facilitators’ (recovery assistance, public infrastructure, labour markets and social assistance, and market dynamics) and ‘emic facilitators’ (families’ resources and subjective recovery priorities). The framework explains how families strategically adapt their emic capacities to
shifting conditions in post-disasters contexts, determining heterogeneous recovery pathways and speeds. It also provides critical empirical insight into the recovery of intangibles within domestic life and gendered recovery burdens. This framework will be of interest to those seeking to understand how families navigate disasters and offers actionable guidance for designing more equitable, context-sensitive recovery policies

Using the concept of ontological security, this chapter demonstrates how women are key protagonists for providing security for their families in disaster contexts. The research explores how women carry out  many activities within the domestic space to recover their ‘homes’ – a space that secures and underpins a sense of self-identity and agency. The strategies are small-scale and “unspectacular”, such as washing clothes by hand given the lack of electricity, cultivating food in the absence of fresh produce, or home-schooling children. Nevertheless, these acts enable family members to secure their homes and a sense of “normality”, which is vital for people in disaster contexts. Ultimately the chapter demonstrates a feminisation of security within the domestic space, which challenges masculinist and patriarchal notions of security. The chapter also suggests that exploring security “from below”, exposes how state-centric conceptualisations of security do not fit neatly with how disaster-affected people define and intuitively enact security within the domestic space.

Researchers are increasingly expected to communicate their work creatively and comics have emerged as a popular medium for public engagement. Yet, practical guidance on transforming research into comics is lacking. Drawing on my experience translating disaster research into comics, this paper offers a step-by-step guide for researchers wanting to take the leap into creating comics. The guide addresses key considerations, including understanding comics’ language and conventions, selecting findings to communicate, scriptwriting, participatory scripting, collaborating with illustrators, and character development. Grounded in literature on disasters, comics, and creative methodologies, it explains the rationale behind each step while demonstrating how comics enhance research. Comics not only make findings more accessible but also foster participatory research, generate unexpected insights, enable ethical representation of participants, and unleash researchers’ creativity. Although the examples center on disaster research, the guide is designed for scholars across disciplines who are interested in creatively narrativizing their work.

This paper explores how public servants in aid-recipient countries perceive and encounter the development structures and normative discourses of South–South partnerships. It draws on interviews with senior public servants in the Antigua and Barbuda government who interface directly with Chinese aid delivery. The public servants perceive that ‘Northern’ development models have largely failed and they are attracted to ‘Southern’ donors alternative development pathways. They perceive that South–South partnerships give aid-recipient countries greater control over their development futures, invoking some of the original radicalism of South–South partnerships. They also perceive that Western critiques of Chinese aid are underpinned by orientalism, and they reject notions that they are being passively integrated into the Chinese government’s global vision. Yet, they do not passively internalise the normative discourses on South–South partnerships. This paper advances a multi-scalar postcolonial geographical analysis of South–South partnerships and will be of interest to those exploring how aid-recipient countries navigate the politics and power relations of the contemporary global aid landscape. The paper also advances debates on how subaltern geopolitics play out in the context of increasing South–South partnerships. Finally, with its focus on South–South partnerships, the paper contributes to the aid ethnographies literature.

In this chapter, I argue that postcolonial theory will enable economic geographers to reinterpret and reimagine disaster recovery as a process that is not the sole responsibility of the state, and which cannot be gauged by statistically measuring the health of the economy. A postcolonial methodology offers a solid historicization of disaster contexts and how the need to adapt and be resilient among marginalized people across the world has its origins in their placation, exploitation and colonization. Postcolonial thinking can provide economic geographers with the methodology to unearth how anti-colonial and normative forms of societal and economic organization may rupture from disasters at the grassroots level. Therefore, adopting a postcolonial methodology in disaster contexts is not merely about trying to understand how a society recovers or moving beyond simple statistical measurements of the economy. It is also about exposing and thinking critically about alternative futures that take seek to address the structures that (re)produce the vulnerabilities that predicate disasters.

Drawing on my experience with creative research translation, in this work I discuss how comics provide several possibilities to communicate climate change using geographical analysis and anti-essentialist representations. Comics can be deployed as a multi-modal method that encourages researchers to use thick description to communicate embodied, intangible, and hidden experiences of life with climate change that are difficult to capture in other ways. Comics are also a powerful way for authors to visualise how life with climate change is multi-temporal and to capture diverse images of still-possible and alternative climate futures that move beyond apocalyptic imaginaries to inform debates about the geographies of hope as they relate to climate change. Finally, comics can enhance the participatory nature of research and facilitate a move to more ‘desire-based’ research frameworks that emphasise character-driven and anti-essentialist narratives. The work reported here should be of broad interest among geographers engaging in geohumanities and climate change researchers experimenting with creative methods to narrativise and communicate human experiences of climate change. My intentions are to move beyond disciplinary boundaries; speak to scholars working in the interdisciplinary fields of climate change, comics studies, climate change communication, and visual studies; and invite more engagement with this mode of creative research translation.

Always spatial, waiting time is the observation of past-present-future, and temporality is the condition of being bounded by time. Both are mechanisms of state governance that control how and when families recover from rapid-onset humanitarian disasters. Analysing these spatio-temporalities reveals how families leverage resources to engage in acts of resilience that challenge the state’s spatio-temporal control of recovery. A case study focuses on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017. We draw on qualitative longitudinal research to explore politicised spatio-temporal experiences of waiting for the state to fix public infrastructures; approve financial support; and provide access to affordable consumables—which all shape families’ recovery rates and pathways. Disaster-affected families do not passively wait for the state and often leverage their incomes and social networks to engage in resilience-based strategies that ease their everyday lives and enable recovery while waiting for the state. Waiting feels more arduous for families with fewer resources and when there is uncertainty about access to the state and how and when to begin certain recovery activities. Waiting in disasters can also provide space for collective socio-political practices such as community gardening to emerge in neighbourhoods. For researchers of disasters, this article highlights the spatio-temporal dimensions of grassroots resilience and the ways in which state power and citizen agency interact in ways that subvert state control of families’ recovery rates in heterogeneous ways. Research on waiting during disasters has great potential to inform and reform governance for resilience and recovery.

This article discusses how the impacts of climate change are shaping the flows of people, capital and goods within the transpacific region. These flows are intimately shaped by the geographies and colonial histories of transpacific small island developing states, as well as the migratory patterns and diaspora communities of small island developing states. Findings are drawn from 12 months of ethnographic research, which explored the recovery of twenty low-income households during the first year after hurricane Maria, which devastated the Caribbean island, Puerto Rico on 21 September 2017. The article is supplemented with images taken from two comics that graphically illustrate the research findings, and which demonstrate how academic research can be fruitfully supplemented with visual representations that can distil complex theoretical ideas into engaging visual formats.

We contribute to critical debates about the ethics, politics and praxis of research impact by drawing on our experiences of translating research into a comic and a zine. We demonstrate how comics and zines construct ethical and nuanced depictions of socio-politically marginalised groups, moving away from ‘damage centred’ research frameworks. Comics and zines enable readers to access places and moments that other mediums are less able to, and they gesture toward a participatory, slowed-down practice of research engagement. Finally, we suggest that current indicators of impact ought to consider the methods and praxis of impact, rather than focus on measurements related to outputs, as a way to creatively encourage research to meaningfully engage with participants and publics.

Studies on the resilience of islanders often strip them of their political agency and reduce their resilient actions to no more than adapting, mitigating and recovering from an exogenous hazard. In this chapter, we challenge this apolitical understanding of island populations by contextualising their acts of resilience within the ongoing and historical colonial processes that characterise many islands across the world. We demonstrate that island people’s acts of grassroots resilience signify implicit acts of political resistance to pursue self-determination and relinquish their dependency on external powers. We draw on the case of Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017 in particular to show how people pursue greater control and sovereignty over their food supply in ways that implicitly challenge US domination over their everyday lives. We also argue that exploring resilience ‘from below’, exposes how state-centric conceptualisations of resilience do not ft neatly with how disaster-affected island people defne and intuitively enact resilience.

Resilience as a complex concept has been recognised and employed to strategise mitigation policies and processes during disruptive events. Island resilience in particular is used to frame islanders and their societies as vulnerable entities combating uncertainties with limited resources and capacities. On the one hand, public discourse on island nations tends to centre around victimhood amid disasters; on the other hand, islands are portrayed as peaceful and idyllic paradise during regular times. This opening chapter uses the term ‘imaginary’ to signify such discourses that construct one’s understanding of island societies. We frst outline the conceptual framing around the evolution of resilience. Then we elaborate on four prominent ‘imaginaries’ of Small Island Developing States and island societies in general. By unpacking the term ‘imaginary’, we aim to expose the dominant discursive framing of island societies to elucidate constructive avenues for locally owned progress and development in an increasingly variable and glocalised world.

Within the field of emotional mapping, and mapping more broadly, nonhuman things are often understood as mere instruments – they have utility but not agency to shape meaning-making. In this paper we experiment with a new method that aims to challenge the dualism between human and non-human things by bridging new materialism and participatory emotional mapping. We experimented with this “new materialist methodology” during a one-day workshop to explore residents’ spatio-emotional experiences in a disaster-affected favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Reflecting on this one-day workshop, we argue that materials with diverse colors, textures, shapes, densities, weights, and smells are key collaborators in emotional mapping. Materials have agency to invoke and evoke diverse emotions with past, present, and future temporalities, and which fall within and beyond the positive-negative emotion binary. Materials can facilitate conviviality and discussion amongst mapping participants, which enables participants to speak about their emotional-spatial experiences with more nuance and complexity.

This paper challenges resilience literature, which often strips grassroots actors of their political agency and reduces their resilient actions to no more than adapting, mitigating and recovering from an exogenous hazard. It does so by applying an everyday resistance framework to unpack Puerto Ricans’ responses to the impacts of hurricane Maria, which devastated the Caribbean Island in 2017. This methodological approach contextualises acts of resilience within the colonial relations that characterise the United States-Puerto Rico relationship. I demonstrate that people’s acts of resilience signify acts of resistance to pursue self-determination and relinquish their dependency on the US for their everyday lives and disaster recovery. Second, I demonstrate how resistance is enacted by women in the domestic space, which challenges masculinist and patriarchal notions of resistance. Third, I suggest that exploring resilience “from below”, exposes how state-centric conceptualisations of resilience do not fit neatly with how disaster-affected people define and intuitively enact resilience.

This essay critically reflects on the comic After Maria, which was researched and written by Dr Gemma Sou and illustrated by John Cei Douglas. After Maria demonstrates how academic writing is no longer impenetrable; researchers can communicate complicated family conflicts with graphic narratives that appeal to the empathetic emotions of its readers. This type of work reshapes western scholarship and it brings critical understanding and engagement with the world events rather than abstract statistical analysis.

This paper draws on lifework interviews with senior civil servants within the Antigua and Barbuda government to explore how southern development experts subvert the development hierarchies that permeate partnership micropolitics. The paper first reveals how southern development experts draw on their experiences and normative discourses of ‘local knowledge’ to dismantle assumptions that whiteness and ‘westerness’ symbolise expertise in partnerships. Second, southern development experts engage in small-scale acts
of everyday resistance to assert their expertise and decentre the authority and knowledge of foreign consultants. Everyday resistance allows this paper to reveal southern experts’ personal agency and subtle forms of resistance, which Foucauldian analyses of power and ‘spectacular’ theories of resistance are unequipped to recognise. I suggest that the racialised and geographic hierarchies, which structure power and privilege in the micro-level encounters between donors and beneficiaries are not as entrenched as we may think.

The article draws on a narrative ethnography of concealing sexuality during and after ethnographic research in Bolivia. First, I demonstrate that in a socially mediated world, the “curation” of researcher identity is no longer temporally and geographically bound to the periods and locales of fieldwork. Second, I argue that a researcher’s decision to conceal elements of their identity may be informed by essentialist assumptions about research participants. Third, researchers may effectively colonise and silence research participants because they speak for them and remove any opportunity for participants to respond to the element of the researcher’s identity being hidden, such as, sexuality, class, or religion.

We further develop the notion of the ‘sensory home’. We reveal how gustatory, olfactory and sonic experiences shape where and when one feels ‘at home’. We draw on a qualitative, longitudinal methodology to explore how low-income Puerto Ricans experienced domestic tastescapes, smellscapes and soundscapes during the first 12 months after Hurricane Maria in 2017. We first show how the sensory home is made with familiar and routine sensory experiences, and unmade by intrusive and unfamiliar tastes, smells and sounds. Second, the sensory home is temporally dynamic as it is constituted by changing processes taking place on multiple scales and by multiple actors – particularly the state and neighbourhood. Thus, un/making the sensory home is inherently political as it is tied to state-citizen power relations – our third contribution. Finally, in disasters people asymmetrically recover not just economically or materially, but as we show, sensorially.

In this chapter we discuss the process and potential of communicating crisis research in creative forms, using the example of comics. We argue that communicating crisis research via comics is a highly democratic process because it ensures your research is accessible to your participants as well as the wider public. Relatedly, the production of comics also enables a more participatory research process whereby participants can shape how their story is told. Comics are also uniquely positioned to produce a politics of representation that challenges reductive, dehumanising, and apolitical narratives about crisis-affected people. Furthermore, comics offer powerful rhetorical power as they are uniquely able to distil complex ideas into engaging and highly learnable forms.

This chapter will introduce you to some of the key ethical considerations within creative research and will encourage you to: Examine the types of ethical considerations relevant to your project; Appreciate the importance of ethical decision-making in creative research; and Identify some of the key ethical challenges within creative research

There are limited explanatory models of household recovery. This study adopts a qualitative, longitudinal methodology to develop a new model of how and why household recovery pathways and speeds are heterogenous. Data was collected over five field visits to Puerto Rico during the first year after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Households mobilise their agency to leverage their assets and recovery priorities to mitigate and/or adapt to four major societal conditions (disaster support; public services; markets; employment and public financial assistance). These societal conditions and household characteristics act as enablers and barriers, which vary over time, and interact to shape households’ capacity to recover. The paper also proposes a new definition of disaster recovery, which reflects households’ pursuit of recovery needs that do not directly adapt to, reduce or avoid the impacts from disasters.

This special section on global development has been developed from a conference roundtable event run by the Development Geographies Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society. In this special section, we (some of the committee) introduce the four papers and their critical contributions to emerging debates. These extend early work on how the “global” is being made, focusing on the projects of multilateral development agencies and state institutions to examine how (and whether) the rebranding of “international development” as “global development” constitutes a shift in thinking and practice. Together, the papers draw our attention to the considerable opportunities and implications that this reframing offers, while highlighting that critical attention is required as to how that framing is deployed and by whom. They reveal disparity between global development as a much-needed reframing of power, agency, and progress and global development as produced by mainstream development actors and interventions, necessitating more critical research into how this normative agenda is adopted and enacted in dominant policy and practice.

In this special issue on Innovation in Humanitarian Action, we look at innovation from a range of angles and interrogate its potentials and pitfalls. The research article by Finnigan and Farkas moves the innovation debate forward by outlining the challenges involved in conceiving of innovation in a holistic sense and beyond technical fixes or laboratories. Among other things, the paper pays particular attention to the dynamics of climate change and rapid urbanisation in its call for the humanitarian sector to address four critical challenges in order to be able to provide meaningful assistance to communities in crisis in the future.

In this paper we use in-depth longitudinal qualitative data to theoretically and empirically demonstrate how intangible resources shape people’s experience of so-called “natural” disasters. Building on this, we critically unpack how intangible resources facilitate household disaster recovery. We focus on home – an intangible resource – in order to explore these

This paper challenges the normative assumption that participatory spaces facilitate democratic deliberation of disaster risk reduction and the downward accountability of local government for disaster risk reduction. The most important theoretical argument concerning decentralised participatory governance is that it can make a government more accountable for the needs of the governed. Key to this process are participatory spaces that act as mechanisms for dialogue between citizens and local government. However, within Cochabamba, a city in the centre of Bolivia, South America, ‘at-risk’ citizens engage minimally with disaster risk issues in participatory spaces, despite high levels of civic participation. This is because ‘at-risk’ populations view disasters as a private/household problem that is symptomatic of household error, rather than seeing them as a broader public problem due to wider structural inequalities. Consequently, they redistribute responsibility for disaster risk reduction towards households, which (re)produces the absolution of government authorities as guarantors of disaster risk reduction.

This article critically analyses the representational practices of serious (video) games that focus on refugees. It argues that the technological form of serious games can simulate the historical, political and socio-economic factors that shape why refugees leave their home country and their experiences when travelling to host countries. They are able to mobilise intellectual agendas which challenge the de-contextualised representations of refugees typical in traditional media. As such, they challenge players to critically reflect on the complexities of refugee experiences and politics, thereby presenting a potential to move away from grand emotional discourses of pity and compassion.

This article challenges the assumption that people are irrational and/or lack the ability to comprehend risk when they do not prioritize risk reduction. Second, it argues that the nature of risk perceptions has less direct influence on responses than previous research suggests. Results are based on ethnographic research in Cochabamba city in Bolivia, where everyday climatic hazards are linked to slow-onset and small-scale impacts. Through exploration of self-build housing the article shows that people with high- and low-risk perceptions equally prepare for the impacts of climatic hazards. This is because people prioritize the transformation and consolidation of social, cultural and economic processes which are not directly related to risk reduction when designing and constructing self-built houses. However, disaster risk reduction is automatically mainstreamed into housing because the design and construction features which people associate with risk reduction represent local architectural norms that are associated with ‘good practice’.

Post-disaster resettlement programmes can be unsuitable and ineffective, often exacerbating the vulnerability of people to the effects of climate change.