The Logic of Resilience as Neoliberal Governmentality Informing Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite the ascendancy of the concept of resilience in political sociology, its criticism has also expanded. In both theory and practice, this paper seeks to unpack and critically explore how resilience as embedded neoliberal governmentality permeates U.S. research in issues relating to natural environmental disasters. By highlighting the neoliberal (resilient) politics of recovery situated in two environmental disasters – Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Harvey – this paper highlights that both pre-disaster and post-disaster recovery realities contrast starkly with the “high-minded” claims of resilience being a form of “emancipatory” resistance. Rather than being identified as natural disasters, both hurricanes are identified as voluntary failures revealing how resilience discourse was used to masquerade opportunity, subjugation, exploitation, and capital accumulation by privatepublic/state-nonstate actors. Both hurricane responses highlight that resilience embedded with a laissez-faire logic privileged types of solutions that directly hindered affected communities “bouncing back”. The third and final sections analyze an alternative conceptualization of resilience pioneered in Cuba which the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) encouraged risk-reduction experts to emulate as a way forward in responding to natural environmental disasters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".