Racializing Resilience: Assemblage, Critique, and Contested Futures in Greater Miami Resilience Planning

Kevin Grove, Savannah Cox and Allain Barnett

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2020, vol. 110, issue 5, 1613-1630

Abstract: This article responds to the following paradox: As government actors have begun to operationalize resilience in a variety of ways and contexts, critical analyses of resilience have continued to sidestep empirical complexity in favor of “black boxing” the concept. This article advances a different analytical path. Drawing on a case study of Greater Miami resilience initiatives, and reading across literatures on critical race theory, critical resilience studies, and Foucauldian-inspired understandings of critical practice, the article develops an inductive framework for analyzing resilience politics and its intersection with prevailing racial formations. Doing so allows us to make sense of two seemingly contradictory events: how, on the one hand, resilience initiatives are topologically recalibrating techniques that produce and manage racialized difference in the Miami metropolitan economy to govern uncertain futures—specifically, segregation, centralization, expertise, and gradualism—and how, on the other hand, activists are mobilizing resilience to both critique and challenge these techniques and their legacies of racial exclusion. We thus argue that resilience is a site of indeterminate politics and that inductive modes of inquiry can help unpack how resilience comes to reinforce uneven power relations—and thus identify previously overlooked possibilities for strategic intervention.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2020.1715778 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:110:y:2020:i:5:p:1613-1630

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1715778

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().