ORCID Profile
0000-0002-8434-2723
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Publisher: Manchester University Press
Date: 09-2019
DOI: 10.7227/JHA.019
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 17-03-2023
Abstract: 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 erse 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.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 13-10-2022
DOI: 10.1111/GEOJ.12413
Abstract: 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 or recovering from an exogenous hazard. I apply 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 situates acts of resilience within the colonial relations that characterise the United States−Puerto Rico relationship. First, people’s acts of resilience are shown to signify acts of resistance to pursue self‐determination and relinquish their dependency on the United States for their everyday lives and disaster recovery. Second, the paper demonstrates how resistance is enacted by women in the domestic space, which challenges masculinist and patriarchal notions of resistance. Third, exploring resilience “from below” is suggested to expose how state‐centric conceptualisations of resilience do not fit neatly with how disaster‐affected people define and intuitively enact resilience.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 17-01-2023
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-05-2017
Publisher: Intellect
Date: 11-2021
DOI: 10.1386/STIC_00055_3
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-10-2021
DOI: 10.1177/23996544211048196
Abstract: Aid partnerships between global north and global south institutions are critiqued for maintaining colonial knowledge politics and restricting the participation of southern development experts. 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.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2021
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2019
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 27-10-2017
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-2021
DOI: 10.1111/AREA.12752
Abstract: 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.
Publisher: Nova Southeastern University
Date: 10-11-2022
DOI: 10.46743/2160-3715/2022.5744
Abstract: 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 erse colors, textures, shapes, densities, weights, and smells are key collaborators in emotional mapping. Materials have agency to invoke and evoke erse 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.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-11-2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 26-09-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 05-07-2021
DOI: 10.1111/AREA.12736
Abstract: Researchers often conceal or reveal parts of their identity to ensure the success of fieldwork. Yet, connection between researchers and research participants can now be maintained via social networking sites. This raises new questions about the ethics and practicalities of negotiating identity during and after fieldwork. The paper draws on a narrative ethnography of concealing my lesbian identity during and after ethnographic research in Bolivia. 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.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 22-11-2018
DOI: 10.1111/DISA.12319
Abstract: 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 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.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 28-02-2019
Abstract: Resilience has become the dominant and normative ideology of sustainability more generally, and disaster recovery more specifically. Most studies focus on how to achieve resilient recovery. This is premised on an assumption that resilience meets the needs and concerns of disaster-affected populations and is thereby sustainable. However, this article critically explores to what extent the recovery needs and concerns of disaster-affected households fit neatly within resilience vernacular and analytical frameworks. The research shows that resilience is informed by a reductive understanding of human needs as many socio-cultural needs of disaster-affected people are marginalized from resilience-based recovery. The article suggests that if disaster recovery is to be a normative and sustainable agenda, then resilience alone may be insufficient, and that needs and concerns that do not directly adapt to, reduce or avoid the impacts of hazards, ought to be prioritized in recovery programmes. The article explores these issues by investigating self-build housing processes in a post-disaster setting in Cochabamba city in Bolivia.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Gemma Sou.