Disrupting Textual Regimes of Climate Disaster Recovery Governance Through Translation

ABSTRACT

Using data sets from ethnographic research, this article examines how language minorities navigate textual regimes in disaster recovery procedures governed by bureaucratic recovery technologies. To discuss the impacts of Western climate governance regimes and alternative disaster recovery communication, this article traces rhetorical practices of transnational multilingual communities of color around a disaster relief program. I argue that community-engaged translation practices operate as the locus of rhetorical strategies against disaster recovery injustice.

KEYWORDS:

• disaster communication
• transnational literacy
• translation
• climate disaster recovery
• textual regimes
• community-based research

Acknowledgements

I thank my participants for sharing their time and stories with me. I also would like to thank the audience members of my ARSTM@NCA 2022 panel session for their feedback on the presentation of preliminary findings from this research study. I thank the special issue editors and anonymous reviewers who shared constructive review comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this article, all the names of cities, counties, organizations, programs, and participants are pseudonyms except for federal programs.

2. In other fields, scholars use the term “community engaged translation” to indicate changing scientific information into more accessible messages with/for local communities (refer to Wierda, DayBranch, & Jacobs, 2023).

3. All the interviews were transcribed, and interview excerpts in Korean were translated into English.

4. Given the small size of the nonprofit, this article uses a number to indicate each participant and they/them/their pronouns to keep and honor confidentiality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the 2018 Graduate School Research Incentive Cullen Fund from my institution at the time of the study.

Notes on contributors

Soyeon Lee

Soyeon Lee is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her research interests include transnational environmental rhetorics, user experience studies, and community-based approaches to technical communication. Her research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals and proceedings such as Composition Forum, Reflections, ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communication (SIGDOC) Proceedings, and Rhetoric, Professional Communication, and Globalization. She is a recipient of the SIGDOC 2021 Best Paper Award.