Beyond outsiders' gaze: Unveiling community resilience 'from below' in post-2013 floods Southern Alberta


Mahed Choudhury, University of Calgary

National and international initiatives aimed at fortifying community resilience have frequently fallen short of achieving desired outcomes. This shortfall is primarily attributed to the dependence on the technical expertise and knowledge of external (non-local) scientific and policy experts who, more often than not, lack a comprehensive understanding of local realities, including beliefs, values, and practices. Consequently, communities are paradoxically rendered more vulnerable than resilient. As such, there is an urgent need to document resilient communities from an emic (insiders) perspective, capturing the nuanced ways resilience is lived and experienced by community members—what we term as resilience "from below.", often-overlooked and invisible to outsiders and remains undervalued in current literature. It is argued that external interventions to build resilience and empower communities can be oppressive, unsustainable, and perpetuate social inequality if interventions are not locally and culturally appropriate. The study, focusing on post-2013 floods in Southern Alberta, Canada, investigates the aftermath of a devastating event causing billions in losses. Since then, millions of dollars have been spent to strength community resilience. It is claimed that Calgary is now more resilient to floods than it was in 2013. Drawing insights from critical social sciences scholarship on community resilience, the goal is to document communities’ own version of resilience. This study adopts an affirmative critical approach to resilience, arguing that resilience is progressive, transformative, and political as it envisions people as active agents who have control over their own destiny, rather than as passive subjects and victims. Recognizing the plurality of approaches to knowledge, this research aims to explore diverse meanings and understandings of resilience from communities’ own perspectives and experiences. This study adopts a Qualitative Transformative Interpretive Framework (QTIF), relying on communities’ own perspectives as the source of knowledge. This framework posits that knowledge produced in society is not value-neutral, but rather is shaped by power relationships. The goal of knowledge production is to change the lives of people and the institutions they live in., Communities’ meaningful engagement in knowledge production, and due recognition of their experience, learning, and knowledge are critical. This process is likely to facilitate a transformative change in the lives of people. Similar to resilience thinking, this approach also recognizes the value of the “inner strength” that resides within a community rather than its weaknesses or deficiencies. Following QTIF, this research answers questions including: what do flood-affected communities think of their resilience after 10 years? What are the communities’ own perspectives on their resilience trajectories? Is community resilience to floods better than it was in 2013? What might still be needed to enhance community resilience? Preliminary research findings and implications will be discussed in the presentation. We assert that findings will inform people-centered policy formulation and building a viable and sustainable community to climatic-induced disaster risks (i.e., floods). We propose this presentation is relevant to the session (ENV1) on Environmental Sociology at CSA conference and aligns with Congress 2024 theme: Sustaining shared futures, with the focus on risks emanating from dynamic interaction among social, economic, environmental, and technological variables.

Non-presenting authors: Julie Drolet, University of Calgary; Andrea Murphy, University of Calgary

This paper will be presented at the following session: