Kate Driscoll Derickson

From resilience to resourcefulness A critique of resilience policy and activism

This paper provides a theoretical and political critique of how the concept of resilience has been applied to places. It is based upon three main points. First, the ecological concept of resilience is conservative when applied to social relations. Second, resilience is externally defined by state agencies and expert knowledge. Third, a concern with the resilience of places is misplaced in terms of spatial scale, since the processes which shape resilience operate primary at the scale of capitalist social relations. In place of resilience, we offer the concept of resourcefulness as an alternative approach for community groups to foster.

Urban geography I Locating urban theory in the ‘urban age’

In the midst of what has been termed the ‘urban age’, two divergent approaches to understanding life in cities have emerged. In this first of three urban geography progress reports, I engage these two strands of urban theory, identifying key differences in their intellectual, political and geographical genealogies, and consider their political and epistemological implications. Borrowing from Chakrabarty’s concept of History 1 and History 2, I name these approaches ‘Urbanization 1’ and ‘Urbanization 2’. Urbanization 1 is exemplified by the planetary urbanization thesis that posits the complete urbanization of society, whereas Urbanization 2 is characterized by a more diverse set of interventions, united by a political and epistemological strategy of refusing Eurocentrism and ‘provincializing’ urban theory.

Resourcing Scholar-Activism: Collaboration, Transformation, and the Production of Knowledge

In this article we offer a set of resources for scholar-activists to reflect on and guide their practice. We begin by suggesting that research questions should be triangulated to consider not only their scholarly merit but the intellectual and political projects the findings will advance and the research questions of interest to community and social movement collaborators.

Urban geography II: Urban geography in the Age of Ferguson

In August 2014, a white police officer shot Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, USA, fueling the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. The following March, the US Department of Justice produced a report showing that the police department of Ferguson had been explicitly tasked by city officials with using nuisance laws and traffic violations to raise revenue for the municipal coffers. In this second of three progress reports I consider both the empirical evidence and analytical tools urban geographers and those in cognate disciplines have produced that can assist in our analysis of the Age of Ferguson. I conclude by considering what the Age of Ferguson demands from urban geographers, and how we might produce anti-racist scholarship from a ‘white discipline’.

Toward an Interim Politics of Resourcefulness for the Anthropocene

Based on the need for meaningful political responses to socionatural change, in this article we develop an interim politics of resourcefulness as a strategy for addressing the limitations of postpolitical environmental governance. Drawing on political and epistemological insights of third-world feminism as well as an ongoing collaborative with environmental justice organizations in West Atlanta, we argue that visions for just socionatural futures must necessarily be generated in conversation with historically marginalized communities. We offer an interim politics of resourcefulness as one way of forging those kinds of engagements between academic researchers and communities, and describe the forms that such engagements have taken in our own research.

The Racial Politics of Neoliberal Regulation in Post-Katrina Mississippi

After Hurricane Katrina devastated the landscape of much of coastal Mississippi, regional boosters frequently made the counterintuitive claim that the damage wrought by the storm actually represented an opportunity. Based on extensive empirical research and drawing from literature on racialization, white privilege, urban neoliberalism, and disaster capitalism, I show that the “opportunity” the storm produced was to remake the landscape in ways that deepen the neoliberalization of governance in the region. The justification of these governing and accumulation strategies hinged on the twin discourses of the region as a “blank slate” and the racial narrative of what Thomas (2011) calls “banal multiculturalism.” The relationship between the governing and accumulation strategies on the one hand, and the cultural politics of race on the other, are best understood, I argue, through the lens of the often-overlooked regulation approach.

Making space, making race: reconstituting white privilege in Buckhead, Atlanta

The comfortable relationship between the overwhelmingly white, southern Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead and a major hub of nightlife in the region unraveled in the early 2000s as the entire nightclub cluster was delegitimized, discursively constructed as dangerous and out of control, and ultimately razed to make space for luxury shopping. This paper sets out to query what social and cultural relations account for this massive and unpredicted reconfiguration of urban space in the epicenter of wealth, whiteness, and power in Atlanta. By mobilizing the concept of the socio-spatial dialectic (Soja 1980, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 70: 207–225), we draw on Pulidos (2000, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90: 12–40) work on the construction and perpetuation of white privilege to argue that the racialized production of space is a relevant framework for understanding the processes at work in Buckhead. We argue that race was an unstated but deeply important social relation shaping the process by which this particular space was remade. In so doing, we seek to advance the literature on whiteness by demonstrating the ways in which it articulates with the political economy of cities in the present conjuncture.

Gendered, Material, and Partial Knowledges: A Feminist Critique of Neighborhood-Level Indicator Systems

As researchers and community-based organizations increasingly move toward a more ‘holistic approach’ to addressing urban problems, the use of neighborhood-level social indicator systems as a tool to inform resident activism is becoming common practice. In this paper, I use a feminist theoretical framework to critically assess the epistemology and methodology of current practices in the use and development of neighborhood-level indicator systems. Using the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership as a framework, I critique the practices of using quantitative, spatial statistics to ‘democratize information’ within the feminist theoretical debates surrounding the production of knowledge, the use of quantitative methods, difference across gender, essentialism versus antiessentialism, and the discursive production of gender. In so doing, I demonstrate the importance of a feminist theoretical and practical perspective in informing the future development of urban neighborhood-level indicator systems.

Situated solidarities and the practice of scholar-activism

Drawing on an analysis of an ongoing collaboration with rural peasant movements in Bangladesh, we explore the possibility of forging solidarity through practices of scholar-activism. In so doing, we consider the practice of reflexivity, reconsider forms of solidarity, and draw on the concept of convergence spaces as a way to envision sites of possibility. We mobilize the notion of situated solidarities to propose an alternative form of reflexive practice in scholarship. We then posit that there are six ‘practices’ that provide a useful schematic for thinking through the opportunities for the construction of these solidarities.

Taking account of the ‘part of those that have no part’

In this commentary, I argue that Rancière’s concept of the ‘part of those that have no part’ is a valuable and overlooked intervention in how the constitution of ‘the political’ can be understood. While some reject the narrowing of what counts as ‘political’ in Rancière’s work, I argue that by drawing attention to inevitability of the constitutive outside of the social, Rancière forces a constructive reckoning with the way more capacious conceptions of the political can elide and reproduce the inherently partial nature of the attendant social formation.