Absurd geographies of resilience and justice

ABSTRACT

This paper problematizes how scholars understand the relation between resilience and justice. Critical and applied scholarship tends to dismiss resilience as a neoliberal barrier to justice, or assume it necessarily advances justice outcomes. Instead, drawing on collaborative fieldwork with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers, we explore how resilience is mobilized in contextually-specific struggles against racialized vulnerability and insecurity. Reading across literatures in political geography, cultural geography, and Black geographies, we highlight absurd and inconsistent expressions of resilience in our collaborators’ justice advocacy work. A focus on the absurd directs attention to the way diverse practices of resilience emerge from ‘spaces out of joint,’ where modernity’s universalizing promises of betterment run aground against long histories of racial violence that secure White futurity. Our community collaborators ironically mobilize and reject resilience in strategic ways that reflect their struggles to create and defend place against the racialized extraction of value, disinvestment, and displacement. This creates a variegated geography of resilience and justice that is irreducible to predetermined critical or applied analytical frameworks. Instead, we emphasize the need to embrace the absurd destabilization of conventional analytical categories, in order to open space for new problems and responses for collaborative research.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• justice
• racial capitalism
• absurdism
• biopolitics

1. Introduction

How should we understand the relationship between resilience and justice? Proponents and critics of resilience offer starkly different diagnoses. Scholars researching climate change, disasters and development have long recognized that climate change impacts are already affecting historically marginalized communities, and that resilience-building efforts can potentially exacerbate these inequalities (Adger et al., 2006; Eakin & Leurs, 2006). However, some proponents suggest that the emphasis resilience initiatives direct towards building individual and systemic adaptive capacities can make policy more responsive to emerging social needs (Nelson et al., 2007), and enhance capabilities among marginalized groups who lack access to resources (Schlosberg, 2012). Other proponents suggest that considering questions such as ‘resilience to what’ and ‘resilience for whom’ can help resilience initiatives address longstanding development problems, such as political economic inequalities or disproportionate adaptation financing (Cutter, 2016; Ziervogel et al., 2017). However, for critics, resilience initiatives reinforce the neoliberal status quo, impeding justice efforts and exacerbating structural inequalities (e.g. Fainstein, 2015). Recent research only complicates matters. For example, scholars have demonstrated how urban resilience initiatives both reinforce and challenge the political ecological status quo, in cities such as New York (Collier et al., 2017), Boston (Shokry et al., 2023), New Orleans and Medellin (Naef, 2022) and Miami (Cox et al., 2022; Grove et al., 2020a).

Confronted with this indeterminacy, solutions-oriented interdisciplinary research has sought to clarify matters through establishing a stable and operationalizable definition of resilience, and analyzing how various resilience initiatives can address specific justice concerns, such as distributional, procedural or representational inequalities (Meerow et al., 2016, 2019). In this article, we take a different approach. Drawing on ongoing collaborative research with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers, we argue that in order to engage with diverse practices of resilience and their inconsistent political effects, scholars needs to refuse the epistemological compulsion to stabilize the meanings of resilience and justice – whether this involves proponents creating a clear, operationalizable definition of resilience to advance pragmatic solutions to complex socio-environmental problems, or critics’ dismissive assertions that resilience is always already ideologically compromised. At stake is the way this epistemological demand for categorical clarity impedes researchers’ ability to recognize and value diverse practices of resilience and justice that may not fit within predetermined analytical frameworks, but may nevertheless advance common goals of building more just social and ecological futures.

This paper is thus concerned with how we might expand our underlying political and epistemological imaginaries – our often implicit understandings of what counts as power, resistance, critique, and ‘true’, ‘false’, or ‘nonsensical’ knowledge – that shape how applied and critical scholarship understands the relation between resilience and justice. Inspired by calls from McKittrick (2021; McKittrick & Woods, 2007), Sultana (2022), Derickson (2022), and Chandler and Pugh (2023), among others, to allow encounters with diverse forms of knowledge and experience that fall outside conventional scientific frameworks to unsettle our own assumptions about what counts as ‘true’ or ‘proper’ knowledge, in this paper, we dwell on the absurd character of the relation between resilience and justice. While absurdity is conventionally understood as nonsensical or lacking meaning, we bring recent work on the absurd in cultural geography into conversation with scholarship on resilience and justice in fields such as political geography and Black geographies, to approach absurdity as a powerful category for analyzing socio-ecological practices and desires in moments of crisis. As an analytical lens, the absurd foregrounds how the exercise of modernist rationality leads to crisis rather than promised futures of universal betterment. Reflecting the emergence of absurdist movements in art and literature in the wake of catastrophic world wars (Esslin, 1960; Foster, 2002), it expresses the emptiness of rationality, and the ultimate futility of modernist fantasies to escape the world – that is, the futility of human attempts to impose meaning on an irrational reality, a world indifferent to the existence and designs of human consciousness. While not always in these terms, scholars have empirically illustrated these conditions in sites where the promise of modern development leads instead to pervasive, everyday crises of meaning and survival (Bruce, 2022; Mbembe & Roitman, 1995; Povinelli, 2011). These are spaces where individuals struggle to make sense out of, intervene within, and give direction to institutions and infrastructure systems that fail to work as promised. For Wilson (2022), the absurd thus attunes us to ‘space out of joint:’ ‘a space of representational and material rupture and collapse, in which things do not make sense’. Key for our concern with how to understand the relation between resilience and justice, these absurd ‘spaces out of joint’ are spaces that exceed the limits of academic sense-making, or scholars’ efforts to impose clear categorical meaning on social and environmental phenomena. Wilson continues, cautioning that in spaces out of joint, ‘the academic temptation towards “the retroactive imposition of sense on what didn't make sense, the blissful step from blindness to insights … is precisely the moment of obfuscation”’ (Wilson 2022). In other words, the imposition of meaning, order and truth onto an indifferent world often distorts and limits knowledge rather than revealing objective truth. Scholarly efforts to create meaning write out contextual ambiguity and empirical messiness, and thus reveal more about scholars’ own desires for order (cf. Foucault, 2001) than unvarnished empirical truths. Attunement to the absurd can thus enable researchers to reflect on their own meaning-making practices, and desires for clarity and order, by disclosing and unsettling habits of thought that bind scholarly analysis to predetermined analytical frames.

Dwelling on the absurd thus offers a distinct analytical approach to questions of resilience and justice, one that can suspend categorical judgment – or the imposition of meaning onto social and environmental phenomena – and thus avoid potentially blinding applied and critical analyses to diverse practices of resilience and justice that fall outside artificially narrow analytical frameworks. While this approach necessarily sacrifices the kind of conceptual clarity required for instrumental operationalization (cf Meerow et al., 2016), we suggest that an attunement to absurd, seemingly nonsensical renderings and practices of resilience can bring to light new problems, and new responses, that potentially broaden the scope of resilience initiatives to advance justice goals (see Castree, 2016 for similar arguments on interdisciplinary science more broadly).

To develop these arguments, we share preliminary research from an ongoing transdisciplinary research collaboration with social and climate justice organizations in Miami, Florida. The initial phase of research, which we present here, involved interviews with leadership and fieldworkers from each organization (12 interviews total) that explored how they understood and addressed resilience in their justice advocacy work. We describe our methodology at the start of Section 3 below; here, what matters is that many activists’ approaches to resilience and justice do not fit within conventional analytical framings in applied or critical scholarship. When asked to describe how they approached resilience in their organizing work, none advocated for the conventional, operationalized slant on resilience as a future-oriented concern with individual and systemic capacities to adapt to emergent shocks and stressors. Tellingly, each collaborator rejected this sense of resilience as inadequate for describing and addressing the insecurities and vulnerabilities confronting marginalized communities where they work. However, while some collaborators refused to engage with resilience, others offered alternative, ‘absurd’ definitions of resilience. For these collaborators, ‘resilience’ provided a way to communicate marginalized communities’ histories of creating and defending place, the historical legacies of anti-Black and anti-migrant violence that created and continue to sustain toxic physical, social and psychic environments in these communities, and a broad range of cultural, legal and economic resources these communities mobilize to resist displacement, disinvestment and extraction of value. Their ‘absurd’ renderings of resilience rejected conventional concerns with protecting urban systems against future social and environmental disruptions, and instead ironically positioned the concept as one tool amongst others within wider struggles against racially uneven development.

Miami-area justice organizers’ absurd and ironic engagements with resilience thus challenge critical and applied resilience scholars alike to reflect on and destabilize their own epistemological dependence on coherent, transparent definitions of resilience. Instead, they point to the need for scholars to develop ways to recognize and support diverse, even apparently nonsensical approaches to resilience that nonetheless advance shared justice goals. In the remainder of this paper, we develop this argument across four sections. Following this introduction, section two positions literatures on justice and the politics of resilience alongside one another. This move suggests that, while geographic work on justice has moved away from detached, normative theorizing and become increasingly attuned to contextually-specific practices, research on resilience remains reliant on predetermined categories of analysis. Section three analyzes interviews with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers to highlight diverse practices of resilience, and couch these practices in contextually-specific struggles against injustice, insecurity and harm. Our fourth section explores the limits of scholarly efforts to impose predetermined meanings onto resilience and justice, and a brief conclusion considers implications for collaborative research in the Anthropocene.

2. Conceptualizing resilience and justice

Miami provides a particularly provocative context to examine the indeterminate relationships between resilience and justice. While a full review of resilience projects, their political effects and justice implications is beyond the scope of this paper, we can briefly note how the region's major resilience initiatives complicate any analytical attempt to establish single, transparent and objective meanings for ‘resilience’ or ‘justice’. Beginning in the mid-2010s, local governments initiated high-profile resilience projects, such as road-raising and pump installations in Miami Beach, to harden critical stormwater systems and placate footloose real estate investors and global re/insurance markets concerned with sea level rise and increasingly intense hurricanes (Cox, 2023; Taylor & Aalbers, 2022; Wakefield, 2019). In 2016, the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities programme launched the Resilient Greater Miami and the Beaches initiative, which promoted the inclusion of racially and economically marginalized communities’ involvement in the region's resilience planning process. The resulting ‘Resilient305’ resilience strategy positioned equity as an overarching theme for all resilience initiatives, a surprising goal given South Florida's long history of racially exclusionary governance (Grove et al., 2020b). During this time, many social and climate justice advocates seized on interest in resilience to gain financing for long-overlooked issues such as affordable housing and public transportation in minority communities in the successful 2017 $400 million Miami Forever Bond (Grove et al., 2020a). However, other social justice organizations refused to engage with resilience planning, seeing resilience as accommodating a fundamentally unjust system. Since the Resilient305 planning process ended in 2019, three Chief Resilience Officers in the City of Miami government have resigned from their positions, reflecting declining support from the Mayor's office and undermining efforts to advance equity-oriented visions of resilience (Wakefield et al., 2022). Many social and climate justice groups that participated in the planning process began directing their efforts towards issues such as housing justice and climate justice (Cox et al., 2022).

The case of resilience and justice in Miami thus demonstrates the essentially contested character of resilience (Grove, 2018). There is no single, stable definition of resilience. ‘Resilience’ in Miami can refer to the stability of vital urban systems, the security of the region's real estate market and property values, housing access and renters’ rights in a region with a history of racially uneven urban development, inclusion of historically excluded minority groups within urban governance, expanded public service provisioning to previously neglected communities, and a holistic focus on long-term rather than immediate planning goals. Beyond asking questions of ‘resilience to what’ or ‘resilience for whom’ (Cutter, 2016), this quick overview suggests a more fundamental contestation over what ‘resilience’ can and should mean in the first place. It also illustrates how different meanings of resilience can have distinct, even conflicting justice implications, from advancing abolitionist goals or addressing distributional, participatory, and representational inequalities, to reinforcing racially uneven development and exclusionary urban governance.

This wide range of resilience practices, and their diverse and inconsistent political effects, brings to mind Ben Anderson's reflections on a 2013 resilience-themed special issue of Politics. Here, Anderson (2015) emphasized that ‘resilience’ looks quite different as a policy goal, an innate quality, a discourse, a metaphor, an idiom, or an ideology. In essence, his argument is that resilience is an under-determined concept, one that can be attached to any number of political and ethical projects striving to transform how humans can know and govern others and themselves, in relation to increasing complexity and unpredictable futures.

Critical and applied scholars have seized on the under-determined nature of resilience to offer competing diagnoses of resilience initiatives’ justice effects. During the early 2010s, an initial wave of critical scholarship emphasized the resonance between resilience and neoliberal governance reforms (Smirnova et al., 2021). Marxist-inspired critics in fields such as political ecology and urban studies typically approach resilience as a fatally compromised concept that advances the neoliberalization of political ecological relations (Bigger & Webber, 2021; MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012). Fainstein (2015, p. 158), for example, argues that data-driven risk analyses and complex systems theorizing informing resilience planning ignore the processes that produce structural inequalities. Proponents’ efforts to paint resilience initiatives in terms of justice, ‘amount to no more than self-delusion’ (Fainstein, 2015, p. 157). Here, resilience is an ideological concept that obfuscates political economic inequalities. Similarly, scholars drawing on Foucauldian concepts of governmentality and biopolitics approach resilience as a discourse that produces neoliberalizing effects, such as the devolution of emergency management and the creation of individualized, risk-taking citizen-subjects (Evans & Reid, 2014).

Conversely, advocates of resilience assert that the concept offers a novel approach to governance that is adaptive and responsive to complex, emergent social needs and environmental conditions, and thus inherently advances justice agendas (Walker & Salt, 2012). This assumption reflects the influence of new institutional economics on mainstream resilience thinking, which views conflict as an inescapable – ontological – condition of life in a complex world (Grove, 2018). Building resilience provides an opportunity to transform institutions in ways that ameliorate conflict's deleterious impacts on systemic functioning, thus creating more just social and environmental outcomes (Olsson et al., 2014). This is a view some environmental justice scholars share, particularly those drawing on a capabilities approach to justice. A capabilities framework recognizes our immersion in, and dependence on, the functioning of the natural world, and recalibrates justice as an emergent quality that reflects how contextually-specific dynamics shape the nature of environmental harms and the resources available to respond to these harms (Schlosberg, 2012). In this view, resilience is a precondition for achieving justice: as a policy goal and an innate condition amenable to improvement, it offers the systemic meta-stability required to maintain access to resources in the face of environmental disruptions (Holland, 2012; Schlosberg, 2012).

For scholars who affirm the relation between resilience and justice, the question is not if resilience can advance justice agendas, but how this can be achieved. This assumption has driven instrumental research focused on solving ‘technical’ problems of how to design governance institutions and interventions that advance justice agendas. Scholars have thus examined how resilience initiatives have socially and spatially differentiated effects (Cutter, 2016), and catalogued and identified best practices and lessons learned from ongoing resilience policy initiatives that address various dimensions of justice, such as distributional, procedural or representational inequalities (Meerow et al., 2019). Other scholars offer sympathetic critiques of resilience initiatives that are sensitive to structural inequalities, but also recognize the pragmatic utility resilience holds for many social and climate justice advocates. This work similarly approaches resilience as a policy goal focused on preparing for emergent futures, but emphasizes how a focus on contextually-specific vulnerabilities, insecurities and inequalities can offer opportunities to build resilience on normative foundations of rights and justice (Bulkeley et al., 2014; Ziervogel et al., 2017).

Each of these literatures offers a distinct assessment of the relation between resilience and justice. At the same time, each style of analysis relies on a stable meaning of ‘resilience’. Dismissive critiques rely on a stable identity of resilience as part of the ideological armament of neoliberal environmental governance. There is no questioning what resilience is; it exists and is knowable through identifiers such as complexity theory, data-driven risk analysis and other calculative devices that enable government-at-a-distance and produce neoliberal ideological and governmental effects. The relation between resilience and justice is never questioned; it is always a foregone conclusion that resilience impedes justice. Proponents of resilience likewise rely on a stable meaning of resilience to identify positive justice effects. Resilience researchers and some environmental justice scholars base their assessments on stable visions of resilience as a transparent policy goal and mode of thought dedicated to improving government's responsiveness and increasing access to resources. Resilience thus always enhances justice. Sympathetic critiques are more circumspect: they tend to stress that contextual specificities shape the justice effects of resilience-building efforts. But their definition of resilience remains stable: it is a policy goal that seeks to develop individual and systemic capacity to prepare for and adapt to uncertain social and environmental futures.

In all cases, this analytical crutch of a stable definition renders resilience entirely transparent – it has a clear categorical identity, and this identity determines its justice outcomes. This reliance on a stable identity clashes with research on justice in geography and cognate fields. Researchers have gradually moved away from reliance on a single, stable definition of justice and instead focus on the empirical messiness of how justice claims are asserted and challenged in contextually-specific struggles against violence, harm and insecurity. As Przybylinski (2022) details, early critical geographers avoided engaging with justice, reflecting Harvey’s (1973) influential argument that the liberal model of justice could not account for the production of inequality in capitalist societies. Liberal thought approaches justice as a universally valid normative ideal, concerned with limiting infringements on the sovereign individual's rights and entitlements, and ensuring a just distribution of harms and benefits, justly arrived at. For many geographic scholars, this model of justice implicitly justifies and validates the underlying injustices, given the way they appeal for rights, recognition and redress to politico-juridical institutions that produce inequalities. Such appeals only redistribute harms and inequalities, and fail to address their underlying sources (Pulido, 2017; Soja, 2010).

There are close parallels here to initial critiques of resilience. Just as radical scholars rejected liberal visions of justice for complicity in the production of inequality, so too have many critical scholars rejected resilience for complicity in neoliberal governance reforms. However, critical justice scholarship did not stop at a dismissal of liberal justice. Feminist theorists connected justice to issues of recognition and self-determination (Fraser, 1995; Young, 1990). This work emerged alongside the growing influence of environmental justice movements. Together, these fields pushed conceptualizations of justice away from normative definitions to emphasize the forces that create injustices (Pulido, 2000). Scholars stressed the need to contextualize normative theory in order to foreground how our understanding of concepts such as ‘justice’ reflects how we first understand and engage with claims of injustice (Barnett, 2017).

Geographic work has accordingly focused on situated conflicts where claims of injustice are articulated, recognized (or not), and acted upon (or not). This attention to everyday dynamics that shape how contextually-specific grievances and harms are produced and recognized has increasingly influenced contemporary research in novel fields such as climate justice and reparative justice. Critical climate justice requires moving beyond a single vision of climate change's ‘common’ impact on an undifferentiated ‘humanity’, and instead focusing on multiple, cross-scalar, intersecting processes that produce unequal climate vulnerabilities (Baptiste & Rhiney, 2016; Sealey-Huggins, 2017; Sultana, 2022). Reparative justice similarly cautions against appeals to ‘harm’ for the way this logic implicitly reifies racial capitalism by taking the conditions of White life – unlimited growth and development – as baseline conditions (Taiwo, 2022). Instead, reparative justice scholars emphasize the importance of recognizing how contemporary society has been created to facilitate the well-being and comfort of (White, male) liberal human subjects through the instrumental use and consumption of the bodies, environments and spaces of racialized, less-than-human subjects (Taiwo, 2022; Harney & Moten, 2021). Reparative justice, like much work on abolition and climate justice, instead requires recognizing the kind of world we want to create, and repurposing resources and capacities towards creating this world (Gilmore, 2022; Sultana, 2022).

These arguments have important implications for scholars of resilience and justice. They caution that reliance on a stable definition of resilience can create epistemological and political blinders that prevent analysis from exploring the various ways claims to resilience might be taken up and mobilized in contextually-specific ways, in response to contextually-specific vulnerabilities and insecurities. What could the relation between resilience and justice look like if, just as scholarship on justice has opened the concept to multiple, contextually-specific meanings of justice, we similarly create analytical space for multiple, contextually-specific visions of resilience? As examples from Miami detailed above suggest, there is, in practice, no single vision of resilience. Instead, policymakers, practitioners, activists and scholars enrol resilience in multiple, potentially contradictory projects, with indeterminate political effects that are not given in advance by the formal qualities of resilience (Cox et al., 2022). Just as justice cannot be given a predetermined, universally valid definition, but is framed in the context of specific struggles, so too might resilience be a site of contestation rather than a transparent policy objective, sedimented discourse, or ideological tool.

Problematizing the relation between resilience and justice is not an attempt to ‘redeem’ resilience, or show that the concept has inherent progressive or emancipatory potential. Such a move would rely on stabilizing the meaning of resilience to give it a fixed, ‘redeemed’ identity. What matters instead is the empirical fact that many – although by no means all (see Ranganathan & Bratman, 2021) – social and climate justice advocates couch their organizing strategies and activities in the language and imagery of resilience. How resilience is invoked, in other words, matters for the strategies, techniques and trajectories of struggles for more just social and environmental futures. To empirically flesh out this argument, the next section analyzes interviews with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers.

3. Absurd geographies of resilience

Our research activities emerged out of connections some of the authors established with Miami-area social and climate justice advocates through mutual participation in several community-oriented resilience initiatives from 2015 to 2019 (see Grove et al., 2020b). These connections helped develop a transdisciplinary research network, based at the authors’ home institution (Florida International University), designed to integrate humanities and social science research with community-driven resilience-oriented activities. As part of our research within this network, from October 2021 to February 2022 we conducted a series of preliminary interviews (12 total) with our community-based research partners. Our collaborators consisted of leadership and fieldworkers from social and climate justice organizations working in marginalized Miami communities. We detail the methodology we adopted for our research activities, informed by third-wave feminist and indigenous methodologies (e.g. Sandoval, 2000; Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2007) in a separate publication. Here, we can note that the interview format and content were collaboratively designed to allow our partners to share their knowledge and experience engaging with resilience initiatives in their justice organizing, and create qualitative, narrative data for a neighbourhood studies resilience report (currently in draft), which analyzes resilience in terms of the issues confronting the communities our partners work with, and the cultural, economic, and legal resources they dedicate to addressing those issues.

Our collaborators stressed that the interviews allow them to define and reflect on resilience in the manner of their choosing. We limited the imposition of our own understanding of resilience, and social and environmental insecurities, vulnerabilities, and hazards, drawn from academic literature or from previous resilience planning activities in South Florida. The interview process thus created a space for dialogue around alternative understandings of resilience, such as community capacities to create and defend place, and to resist threats such as racialized displacement, disinvestment and extraction of value.¹ The remainder of this section analyzes the diverse visions and approaches to resilience our collaborators developed out of their organizing experiences in four Miami neighbourhoods: Homestead, West Grove, Allapattah and Liberty City, respectively.

3.1. Homestead

Not all research collaborators sought to engage with resilience initiatives. This was clear with a collaborator working in Homestead, a small city in southern Miami-Dade County that has long functioned as a sacrifice zone of sorts for toxic land uses, including military bases and prisons. Given its history as an agricultural region, Homestead is also home to large concentrations of undocumented migrant farmworkers and labourers who are vulnerable to exploitative labour practices and exposed to dangerous levels of chemicals in the workplace (AFSC, 2022). Our collaborator emphasized in an interview with us that these conditions have become institutionalized through routine actions of the state, businesses and landlords:

Whether it's low pay, like the largest disparity between the wealth and value that workers producing and sort of the compensation that they receive, or the ways in which we allow an entire employer class to produce dangerous workplaces, or the ways in which our government, intentionally or not, under-invests in government enforcement agencies that can actually hold employers or corporations accountable. It's all the ways in which, on the government side, on the employer side, on the landlord side, capital and the states are coalescing to produce high levels of exploitation that immigrant workers, especially undocumented workers, are having to face.

This statement captures how dominant political and economic institutions shape toxic, exploitative environments (Wright, 2018) that facilitate the extraction of wealth and value through exposing racialized Others – in this case, undocumented immigrant workers – to physical, psychic, social and environmental hazards. For our collaborator, resilience cannot address these root causes of insecurity:

A system of political economy that produces unjust outcomes - I think there is no level of adaptation to the system. Obviously, as pragmatic actors, we think about harm reduction. We think about ways in which, through policy reforms, we can sort of make the lives of people better. But at the root level, I think there is no adapting to a system that incentivizes and capitalizes extraction, exploitation and the kinds of practices which have made these outcomes almost inevitable.

Their rejection of resilience echoes justice advocates in other contexts, such as New Orleans or Washington, D.C., who view resilience as an ideological imposition that normalizes violence, exploitation and displacement in racially and economically marginalized communities (Ranganathan & Bratman, 2021). In Homestead, activists have adopted several strategies to resist this toxic system and promote the rights and dignity of vulnerable community members. Some pursue awareness-raising campaigns on the unique threats and insecurities faced by many in the community (AFSC, 2022). Others promote workplace organizing, seizing on the way local business interests are dependent for profits on precarious labour. Workplace organizing, our partner emphasized to us, is essential because, ‘it's one of the last remaining places where oppressed subordinated classes of people can engage in a kind of collective action that goes at the core of the motivations of those in power, which is profit in production’.

However, while other collaborators express similar skepticism of resilience, our partners in West Grove, Allapattah and Liberty City developed alternative ways of engaging the concept.

3.2. West Grove

West Coconut Grove, or West Grove, is the site of a historically segregated Black Bahamian migrant community. For much of the past decade, this district has faced increasing gentrification pressures from predatory real estate practices pump-primed by ‘tech bro mayor’ Francis Suarez's post-pandemic attempts to attract tech and crypto investors to the region (Wakefield et al., 2022). Our collaborator, a long-time resident of the neighbourhood, suggested in important language that resilience needed a ‘pause’. They asserted that a ‘pause’ could allow community members to situate current enthusiasm for resilience in relation to the historical context of similar unrealized promises decades earlier:

When you go back and look at just some of the fundamental things that have transpired over time, it causes you to take a pause. Particularly when I hear people say, ‘well, it's the greatest thing’ – no, no, no, let's go back and let's talk through what was great, but also what was bad about it. I see the need for a pause because I think a lot of the issues and concerns get overshadowed. So if the real results of what has transpired over all these years, and how people have survived and how resilient they are gets captured [for reflection], it gives individuals an opportunity to assess what areas do we need to make corrections and possibly identify where you can go in and make fixes … so that people have a real understanding of what was not accomplished, good intent or bad. You know, sometimes if you don't take a step back and really assess the situation you could move forward down the wrong path.

This ‘pause’ is an absurd gesture that destabilizes the settled meaning of resilience and signals alternative styles of sense-making. It refuses ‘rational’ demands for immediate action to build resilience against impending threats, and the promise of stable and secure futures. Instead, it indicates a ‘space out of joint’ (Wilson, 2022) that holds the promise of resilience against ‘the real results of what has transpired over the years’, the histories of anti-Black violence, extraction, and displacement, and Black struggle and place-making in West Grove that might provide alternative orientations towards insecurity.

The critical distance a ‘pause’ creates allowed our partner to explore alternative meanings of resilience informed by, in their words, ‘a lot of the issues and concerns’ that ‘get overshadowed’. As they explained to us:

I actually see it [resilience] as a social issue in addition [to environmental issues]. Primarily because, in certain communities, inherently individuals are dealing with these types of situations, so they’re already trying to overcome various obstacles. And then you couple that with an environmental concern … . if you are already coming from a disadvantaged community and having to deal with certain issues already, this just compounds that particular situation.

Resilience, in this view, is irreducible to future systemic security. Our partner's invocation of recurring and compounded obstacles and issues that have ‘transpired over all these years’ positions resilience in relation to the racially fractured temporalities of liberal biopolitics (Anderson et al., 2020). Work in Black geographies and Caribbean studies has demonstrated how a modern sense of the future as open-ended and amenable to calculative, strategic intervention was historically conditioned on the denial of futurity from those marked as non-White, less-than-human Others excluded from the rights, protections and expectations of the White liberal individual (Hartman, 1997). Moreover, the dehumanizing use and consumption of racialized bodies as instruments in life-expanding projects of liberal growth and development enabled White subjects to first experience time as open-ended futurity (Thomas, 2016). In contrast, the temporalities of racialized subjects consist of repetition and duration: the plantation's dehumanizing violence, topologically de-and-re-formed in Jim Crow segregation and the carceral state (Sharpe, 2016); the enervating endurance of suspended life immersed in the immediacy of surviving unlivable conditions (Sexton, 2010), respectively.

Situating resilience in Miami's disjointed toxic environments of anti-Blackness resonates strongly with our Homestead collaborator's focus on how Miami's political economy produces unjust outcomes. Both emphasize how everyday conditions of vulnerability and insecurity have been historically produced by institutions and practices of Miami's history of racial capitalism. However, our collaborators mobilize this history in distinct ways. Our partner in West Grove deploys this history not to reject resilience, but rather to destabilize conventional ways of knowing and building resilience, and offer a more ‘holistic’ vision of resilience instead:

So that's why I say … it's really more holistic, because sometimes I don't necessarily know that communities recognize when a process is systemically working against them. And so, by the time you figure it out you’re so far down the road that, how do you as an individual reverse what has systemically happened to you? And I believe that is part of what happened to the historic community that had been given various promises over the years, going back even to the Jim Crow days, that didn't come to fruition. So as an organization … we’re trying to say it's never too late to try and save what you have, at least to save some semblance and particularly some of the history.

Here, our collaborator emphasizes how collecting and sharing community members’ unique forms of knowledge and experiences garnered from decades of creating and defending their community can help ‘save what you have’. At stake here is community members’ ability to defend their community against displacement pressures. Of course, community history and education is not a silver bullet, and our partner's organization is involved in multiple forms of advocacy work, from legal battles over rezoning, building code changes, evictions and demolition and new construction permitting to mutual aid for community members impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within this work, community history and education contribute to an expanded, ‘holistic’ sense of resilience that indexes a community's capacity to know and resist the recurring violence of racialized displacement, disinvestment and extraction.

3.3. Allapattah

Our partners in Allapattah similarly described resilience in relation to histories of racialized displacement, disinvestment, extraction of value and resistance. Allapattah has historically been relatively marginalized within the Miami region, characterized by institutional and industrial land uses interspersed with low-income housing for Dominican migrants and Black residents displaced by urban renewal projects in nearby Overtown (the historic heart of Miami's Black community). In the last decade, redevelopment initiatives led by the City of Miami have targeted vacant space in Allapattah and nearby Little Haiti for mega-development projects, such as the Bjarke Ingels Group's Miami Produce development, located at the site of the Allapattah produce market. These development interests have sought to facilitate displacement through renaming the community in ways that erase Allapattah's unique history – and thus the role that historically marginalized migrant groups have played in shaping the space. One partner explained to us:

Do you know why developers started calling Allapattah ‘West of Wynwood?’ … . They want to rewrite the narrative because they know that not a lot of people know the history of Allapattah. They know, ‘Allapattah, oh it's a bad neighborhood,’ but their idea is, if we rebrand this into something else, people are not gonna question when the residents of Allapattah start talking. ‘Well that's not you, that's West of Wynwood.’ But that is Allapattah. So, it's the idea that they can rewrite what the area is, what the area's history is, with a new name. And, there's history there, but not a lot of people know about it.

In this light, community organizers’ efforts to ward off displacement emphasize the importance of educating residents of both Allapattah and the wider region on Allapattah’s history:

The more people know the deep history of the neighborhood, the role it's played in several migrant communities that have called Miami home, and grown from there … the less successful those who want to just change the neighborhood into something that they see fit versus what the neighborhood actually needs, will be.

For our collaborator, knowledge of Allapattah's history counters instrumental uses of the space and lives of Allapattah, expressed in developers’ ongoing efforts to extract wealth from the neighbourhood through displacing its current residents. Just as in West Grove, they similarly link resilience to educational practices that enable residents to connect predatory development practices to wider histories of community struggle and success:

Part of resilience is this idea that if you don't know what's happened, how can you be best prepared for what's happening now or coming? And so, for us, the big part of that idea of helping their community stay resilient is preserving those stories of those residents and business owners and concerned activists that have been in Allapattah for years, who’ve done what I call the ‘leg work,’ who were those rabble rousers, who saw the community change.

In both Allapattah and West Grove, community advocates deploy an absurd sense of resilience as attunement to past harms and victories – both to understand the system they are facing and past successes. Community education and public pedagogy play an important role in collecting, archiving and sharing stories. Community knowledge of ‘rabble rousing’, the ‘leg work’ of past place-making activities, is a form of knowledge threatened with subjugation, rendered illegitimate, unscientific and eliminated from the official historical record (Foucault, 2003). In Allapattah, just as in West Grove, our collaborator pairs community history with other initiatives, such as grassroots relief efforts, youth empowerment initiatives, local business support programmes, and housing rights campaigns. Taken together, their initiatives suggest that absurdly holistic practices of resilience are one part of a multifaceted struggle against forms of power that are themselves multifaceted (Gilmore, 2022).

3.4. Liberty City

Another distinct practice of resilience comes from our research partner based in Liberty City. The neighbourhood has served as a cultural hub of Black Miami since the 1950s, when urban renewal-era freeways through the centre of nearby Overtown displaced thousands of Black residents into newly-built public housing projects on the outskirts of a formerly working class white suburb. Unsurprisingly, it has been a site of recurring racial violence to maintain colour lines during and after Jim Crow segregation, as well as organized abandonment, represented by severe underinvestment in public services. These conditions have created what one Liberty City collaborator described to us as ‘toxic stress’ of everyday life:

Folks that we organize with experience what we call ‘toxic stress.’ The day to day is intense – it's childcare, it's work, it's on the bus, it's missing the bus, it rains – it's all those things, and that kind of lifestyle does not allow for you to be in planning mode.

‘Planning mode’ suggests a psychological and social space distinct from the exhausting and debilitating struggle for everyday survival in toxic environments that decades of organized abandonment have produced. Reclaiming the ability to have a future – an inversion of liberalism's racially uneven biopolitics – is, for our collaborator, an essential component of an expanded sense of resilience that foregrounds the everyday needs and capacities of South Florida's marginalized communities. As they explained to us:

We tend to describe resilience as people's ability to bounce back. Do folks have savings for, anything from the ability to prepare for a storm that is coming, if there is a pandemic of some sort and they lose their job. Are they able to withstand a few months, three months, on what they save? And now, this pandemic has really had us come away from planning in terms of three months, because here we are a year and a half later and folks are still trying to figure out how they can make their resources stretch. And so, it's their ability to bounce back.

She later cautioned that well-meaning, equity-oriented resilience efforts such as Resilient305 could exacerbate rather than ameliorate inequalities and injustices – and thus need more engagement with equity principles:

I think we could stand to see a lot more equity. We think about what we call the unintentional negative impacts of some of our resilience efforts, and how they disproportionately impact our communities. I can give a few examples. More green space: Whose homes are being infringed upon? Who's been pushed out of the communities? Often it's the folks who can't afford to even actually move, right? Those are things we need to think about. I think equity lenses always have us ask the question in terms of what are some negative implications of whatever amazing proposal we’re thinking about and who's that going to have an impact on, and if it's going to have an impact on our communities, who are disproportionately impacted?

Equity here is not inclusion within dominant institutions that have guided decades of racial capitalism. Beyond asking resilience ‘to what’ and ‘for whom’, our partner emphasizes the importance of radically reconceptualizing what resilience can mean in the first place, in terms of the specific issues confronting Miami's marginalized communities. These issues are not defined by a future-oriented systemic approach, but rather by a sense of the way historical processes of disinvestment and the extraction of value persist today, and continue to produce social and environmental inequalities that resilience initiatives can intensify rather than ameliorate. As she emphasized, resilience requires engaging with housing and tenants’ rights to protect marginalized communities against displacement and extraction of value through speculative real estate investments: ‘What policies can be put in place that can allow for people to actually thrive? For us it's around protections for tenants’ rights.’

Thus, just as our collaborators in West Grove and Allapattah offered absurdly holistic renderings of resilience, so too does our collaborator in Liberty City offer an absurd rendering of equity in resilience. Rather than referencing equity as an instrumental principle – a means to solve the ‘social’ problems of socio-ecological complexity – our partner's sense of equity casts a critical eye on the ‘negative implications’ of seemingly apolitical, beneficial resilience initiatives, and asks whose future and well-being must be sacrificed for the urban system's resilience (Colebrook, 2020). Their vision of resilience is explicitly oriented around reclaiming a future for Liberty City residents – a position that turns on expanding housing and tenant rights that restrict the unlimited freedom of property owners and speculative investors and developers. This is a radical inversion of the racially uneven distribution of futurity that decades of racial capitalism have produced in Miami. It confronts White-identifying development interests’ instrumental use of racialized bodies and spaces in the realization of White desire with its own claims on futurity. As above, our partner's sense of equity and resilience is part of a multifaceted suite of advocacy work. Nevertheless, it shows how justice organizers can mobilize the concept of resilience to articulate alternative visions of futurity, and the possibility of realizing greater self-determination through securing vulnerable residents’ ability to claim and remain in place.

4. The limits of resilience and justice

Taken together, our collaborators offer four distinct styles of engaging resilience in their justice work. We want to stress that none of these styles is ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ Instead, what matters for us is how, taken together, they illustrate the absurdity of resilience and justice in Miami. This is so in least three ways. First, our partners’ engagements with resilience emerge out of common yet different ‘spaces out of joint’ (Wilson, 2022) marked by the disjuncture between historical promises of community development, current promises of resilient futures, and the histories and ongoing realities of racial capitalism in our collaborators’ communities. Just as absurdism revealed the violence of modern rationality (Esslin, 1960), so too do these nonsensical expressions of resilience (in relation to conventional understandings of the term in applied and critical scholarship) reveal the violence and irrationality that subsists within cybernetically rational attempts to secure ‘Miami’ as a complex urban system against emergent futures.

Second, they also demonstrate the absence of a full, settled meaning of resilience. Recognizing how the urban system is constituted through racialized practices of displacement, disinvestment and extraction of value destabilizes settled meanings of resilience and justice, and opens onto multiple practices of resilience that are irreducible to each other. In Homestead, the violent exploitation of undocumented labour leads our collaborator to reject resilience and emphasize workplace organizing. In West Grove and Allapattah, ongoing efforts to eliminate the histories of marginalized communities who have constructed those neighbourhoods over generations lead our partners to advance an alternative sense of resilience, attuned to the history of racial violence and resistance, as one element among others in their wider place-making efforts. In Liberty City, attunement to the history of racially uneven development foregrounds how toxic stress prevents many residents from planning, and leads to an alternative sense of resilience that emphasizes the political economic conditions necessary to claim a future.

Third, read together, these diverse practices demonstrate the ultimate futility that comes from attempts to ascribe a single definition to resilience. As we saw above, applied and critical scholarship on resilience and justice rely on deductive styles of reasoning, or the application of predetermined categories of analysis to explain and make sense out of empirical situations. These arguments are sustainable only to the extent that the definition of ‘resilience’ as a policy goal or ideology or discourse remains stable, transparent and unproblematized. However, our partners’ uses of resilience to understand and articulate histories of racial capitalism, and the durative and repetitive temporalities of Black and other non-White minority life that sustain White futurity, destabilizes conventional understandings of resilience. Their diverse styles of mobilizing resilience in their justice work highlights several epistemological, ethical and political blind spots within conventional applied and critical research on resilience and justice.

First, the attention our partners’ deployments of resilience dedicate to the ways that vulnerabilities and insecurities are shaped by histories of racial violence challenges the common assumption within applied research that the complex socio-ecological system is a transparent and unproblematic object of security. Instead, their practices of resilience show how the urban system is sustained through racialized practices of displacement, disinvestment and extraction of value that generate wealth for White and White-identifying development interests. Indeed, our partners who articulated affirmative definitions of resilience explicitly rejected the primacy of urban systemic security. Our collaborators in West Grove, Allapattah and Liberty City make resilience one component of their work only after they have deconstructed conventional understandings of resilience and offered alternative, ‘holistic’ senses of resilience attuned to place-based histories of racial capitalism. In effect, they draw attention to forms of social and environmental uncertainty, vulnerability and insecurity that do not fit within conventional applied resilience frameworks, for these conditions make up the system's background noise, the acceptable forms of everyday harm, loss and suffering that do not command political or ethical attention (Berlant, 2011; Povinelli, 2011). To ignore this history, as our partner in Homestead emphasized, is to sustain a fundamentally unjust political economic system and the toxic environments it depends on. In this light, failing to create analytical space for the histories, knowledges and experiences of racial violence can reproduce the implicit desires and demands for marginalized groups to sacrifice their communities, neighbourhoods and livelihoods to ensure the resilience of White property (see also Hardy et al., 2022; Pulido, 2017; Ranganathan & Bratman, 2021).

Second, while none of our partners toe the conventional line on resilience, many of them also do not share the conventional critical rejection of resilience. To be sure, our partner in Homestead rejected the concept of resilience, a move that many critics would likely support. We similarly support this rejection given the power dynamics our partners confront in this neighbourhood. However, we think it is equally important to recognize how other collaborators also refuse to refuse resilience (cf. Harney & Moten, 2013). Their practices demonstrate an ironic use of resilience (Colebrook, 2000; Rickards, 2020): they use the term under erasure, rejecting its core conceptual components (such as assumptions on the primacy of systemic security) while mobilizing the concept to draw attention to legacies of racial violence that are often silenced in conventional resilience approaches. In revealing anti-Black violence at the heart of systemic security and visions of resilient futures, their ironic uses of resilience allow our partners to articulate claims of harm and injustice that would otherwise remain unrecognized. As such, the multiple practices of resilience we see in Miami, and the ultimate futility of ascribing any fixed meaning to the term, enables our partners to raise new issues and consider alternative responses. The failure of critical approaches to consider how resilience might enable the articulation of injustice claims, as part of a wider, multifaceted approach to justice work, risks reproducing the silencing of Black and other non-White minority place-making practices, or treating these practices as either derivative from, or perversions of, ‘authentic’ political action (McKittrick, 2021; Moulton & Salo, 2022).

Taken together, these blind spots indicate epistemological, ethical and political limits within applied and critical approaches to resilience and justice. These limits reflect how both approaches assume resilience is a transparent category whose meaning is always objective and immediately available for analysis and judgement. Our partners’ multifaceted use of resilience in their justice work, in contrast, shows that no such transparency exists. There is a degree of opacity to resilience, particularly when justice advocates mobilize the concept to theorize histories of racialized violence, resistance and creative place-making. Adherence to canonical styles of analysis, and the implicit assumptions of transparency that ground the Western canon (Ferreira da Silva, 2022), can reproduce forms of epistemic erasure that sustain White privilege – in this case, the privilege to narrate whose practices of resilience and justice count as legitimate and worthy of ethical and political support. In the process, they risk blinding analyses to alternative practices of politics, and thus reinforce rather than destabilize barriers to more collaborative forms of transdisciplinary engagement between justice advocates and their nominal allies.

5. Conclusions

As resilience continues to feature prominently in urban climate change adaptation strategies throughout the world, the case of Miami illustrates how social and climate justice advocates do not confine their practices to the binary framing of either embracing or rejecting resilience found in applied and critical literatures. While some do reject the concept, others develop ironic uses of the term that transgress its conceptual limits and make resilience available for alternative kinds of justice work. Key here is the way our partners engage with and mobilize subjugated knowledge and experience to destabilize settled meanings of resilience. Histories of racial violence, accounts of contemporary toxic environments, and stories of current and past struggles, victories and defeats express Black and non-White minority place-making practices in contexts of white supremacy (Moulton & Salo, 2022). Placing these at the heart of their understandings of resilience allows our partners to reject conventional styles of resilience, and transform the concept's meaning to articulate claims of injustice and stake claims on futurity.

While we have focused here on how our partners mobilize resilience within place-specific struggles for justice, we can also recognize how multiple styles of resilience present challenges to the role of academic researchers and their support for justice-oriented approaches to resilience and climate change adaptation. In particular, this analysis challenges the privileged claims of many scholars to guide resilience agendas. Key here is how our partners’ work, in various ways, calls into question the assumption that the relation between resilience and justice is transparent, and is necessarily determined by the formal qualities of resilience. Instead, it points to a variety of forms of insecurity, harm, suffering and resistance that will not be analytically transparent (Derickson, 2022).

Rather than imposing agendas based on narrow and limiting assumptions about the nature of resilience – positive or negative – the question becomes how scholars of resilience and climate change committed to realizing more just socio-ecological worlds might reinvent our research and outreach practices to transform ourselves and our institutions into resources available for common struggle. There are strong examples of this kind of work in growing bodies of research on abolitionist ecology (Heynen, 2020) and Black ecologies (Moulton & Salo, 2022; Roane, 2018). This work, and its struggles against the violent epistemological, ethical and material erasure of Black lives, knowledge and experience, does not need to engage with resilience, and stands against conventional resilience agendas (Hardy et al., 2022; Ranganathan & Bratman, 2021). But our partners’ justice work in Miami shows that resilience can play a part in wider anti-racist struggles for more just socio-ecological futures. The challenge going forward is to advance ethico-epistemological frameworks that reject the adherence to canonical modes of explanation. Instead, there is a pressing need to embrace the absurd destabilization of conventional categories of analysis that can open up new problems and approaches for collaborative research.

Ethics declaration

The inclusion of human participants in this research was approved by the Office of Research Integrity at Florida International University, IRB Protocol Approval # IRB-21-0419.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Kimberley Thomas, Kevon Rhiney, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and feedback. Kevin Grove dedicates this article to Smuckers, the best writing buddy an author could have.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation [grant number 2008-09004].

Notes on contributors

Kevin Grove

Kevin Grove is Associate Professor of Geography at Florida International University, and Editor-in-Chief at Political Geography. He researches the politics of resilience in the Anthropocene, which he has explored in publications such as Resilience (Routledge), and articles in journals including the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Geoforum, Economy & Society, cultural geographies, and Security Dialogue.

Genevieve Reid

Genevieve Reid is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Florida International University. Her research in the field of critical GIScience focuses on issues of data justice, Indigenous data sovereignty, and geospatial ontologies, with an emphasis on the co-production of knowledge with local and Indigenous communities to counter mainstream spatial representations and extractive data practices.

Sarah Molinari

Sarah Molinari is a cultural anthropologist, educator, and public scholar who researches the politics and lived experiences of debt and disaster recovery processes in Puerto Rico. Sarah is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute where she is working in Puerto Rico on a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration project called the Caribbean Climate Adaptation Network. Sarah is a Co-Founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus and the Editor-in-Chief of a public anthropology project called Home/Field.

Joshua Falcon

Joshua Falcon is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and a Lecturer of Anthropology at Florida International University and State University of New York, Purchase. His research interests center on subjectivity as a site of political contestation by exploring the cultural practices surrounding the contemporary use of psychedelic drugs in the United States.

Aarti Mehta-Kroll

Aarti Mehta-Kroll is a doctoral student and Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Global Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Her research focuses on how community capacities are mobilized to meet the threats of physical and affective displacement caused by gentrification.

Edurne Sosa El Fakih

Edurne Sosa El Fakih is a graduate of Florida International University and is pursuing an MPhil in Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Her research interests marry together her anthropological thirst and hospitality/tourism experience, by making interventions in the anthropology of tourism and luxury hospitality.

Alejandra Sepulveda-Reyes

Alejandra Sepulveda is a proud alumna of Florida International University. Her research interests are at the intersection of environmental health and epidemiology. She is currently pursuing an MPH in Epidemiology at the University of South Florida.

David Ortiz

David Ortiz is a pursuing a PhD in Geography at the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. His research interests combine research on urban geography, urban sociology, and critical GIS to understand how informal housing, in the form of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) and garages turned into rental units, operate in South Florida as a complex and well established housing system.

Notes

1 A second stage of research activities is ongoing, which involves activities that explore the role community history construction and sharing can play in advancing alternative visions of resilience our interview dialogues identified.