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I find Ameen's description of a 'rich discussion' between the facilitator and locals very helpful and accurate. It resonates with my experience.
A team I worked with between 2008-2014 in Tanzania had similar discussions about Swahili terminology that made sense to local people. The additional twist was that local people found 'official' Swahili used in government documents about climate change and extreme events linked to CA difficult to understand. The discussion often broadened out to address words that we'd not consider 'technical' (specifically focused on extreme weather events or events triggered by them such as landslides or floods). The word 'change' was problematic, for example. Finally, it wasn't just individual words but the entire discourse of 'climate change' that some locals suspected was aimed at manipulating them, even 'blaming the victim' and used by elites to justify land grabs.
This 'rich discussion' (in Ameen's phrase) was as much among locals as between them and our facilitator team. That sort of discussion is very positive and can lead to social mobilisation and (dare I use another problematic term?): transformation.
These recent emails in the chain not only pick up the message in my original note that 'words matter', they also show how the three silences I identified in UNISDR's definition of 'vulnerability' are interconnected: Power, institutional failure and intentionality. The last of these three is clearly seen in the push back by locals Ameen described and our team experienced in Tanzania. It is also there in the statement by the NGO with which Arthur works that they 'choose to be resources' (not 'victims').
Best wishes, BEN-----Original Message-----
From: Ameen Benjamin
Sent: Oct 1, 2015 8:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]Subject: Re: Sendai framework drags old HFA definition of vulnerability like Marley's ghost his chains!Hi Ilan and others,We experienced precisely the same challenge when translating a rudimentary definition of vulnerability (and other DRR terms) into other South African languages, particularly isiXhosa. See for example Weathering the Storm: Participatory Risk Assessments for Informal Settlements (http://www.preventionweb.net/files/4163_weathering.pdf).Experts fluent in the indigenous language were challenged in translating the concept (and other terms) to locals. Locals were further challenged in understanding the term, and many CRA/PDRA/CBDRM sessions ended up in a debate (or rather rich discussion) between the "expert facilitator" and the community in terms of the correct definition of the term/s in the local indigenous language -i.e. in order to be more simply understood by the common folk.Regards,Ameen BenjaminOn Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Avianto Amri <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Very interesting discussion. The words that we use are influenced by language, perspectives, and culture. My areas of working is with children in South East Asia region in the past few years, and it has been a challenge to use these terms, particularly to children. For example, the best way that I can find to explain resilience is using bamboos as a metaphor.
Therefore, it looks like there will not be a single definition that will please everybody and fits for all people. Even though there is a consensus, there still be some that will be lost in translation. What is important again is to identify the essential elements so we can best define vulnerability and resilience that will eventually helps the people who will disseminate this to others. For example, a school teacher trying to explain the terms to a 10 year old children or how local NGO staff use it to convince the local policymakers. If we can succeed using this mindset, I think it is a good start.Kind regards,AviantoOn Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 5:58 PM, Ilan Kelman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:We struggled with exactly these vocabulary and language challenges when writing and editing "Disability and Disaster: Explorations and Exchanges" http://palgrave.com/page/detail/disability-and-disaster-ilan-kelman/?K=9781137485991 as well as the Council of Europe's work http://www.coe.int/en/web/europarisks/-/disability-and-disaster-preparedness on the topic led by David Alexander https://www.ucl.ac.uk/rdr/people/david-alexanderThe differences amongst US, UK, and European English, not to mention between disaster and disability fields, were remarkable--in addition to different fields within disability and different fields within disaster. And, quite fairly, people have individual preferences regarding how they wish to describe themselves. Some people were militant regarding what words must be used. Others, chose their own and did not mind what others chose.Then, there is the mess of climate change vocabulary which also has to be different. See the citations on vulnerability and resilience given previously.Finally, once we have thoroughly bloodied each other over how to speak and write English, we must translate it all into other languages. In French, the usual phrase is 'personnes handicapées' which seems to some to be anathema in English, apart from an international NGO using the phrase in English (and, naturally, apart from French being a different language to English). Trying to translate 'resilience' (the way we are debating it here) into Norwegian is almost impossible, so either the English word or the variant from English of 'resiliens' is used, although I have seen 'robusthet', i.e. robustness, as well.Any comments from those speaking other, especially non-European, languages? Preferably in English, thank you. Best to everyone,IlanTwitter @IlanKelman
From: Lakshmi Fjord <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2015 10:37 PM
Subject: Re: [RADIX] Sendai framework drags old HFA definition of vulnerability like Marley's ghost his chains!
In the US disability rights movement, advocates call themselves disabled people. Why? Because they argue that what disables them is not their traits or embodiments so much as as the social and environmental barriers that make it impossible for them to participate fully ie. the limitations in experience of able-bodied thinking and designing. And, when these barriers are addressed creatively using disability expertise, then everyone is better off. Who hasn't been injured or tired or sick and needs to use ramps, adjustable clinical exam tables, and the like? Who doesn't enjoy texting or other uses of their keyboards? To be labeled a person "with" a disability locates the cause of their marginalization in their embodied traits -- their "special needs," to use a US common fallacy -- deflecting attention from social and built barriers that will disable anyone who grows deaf or loses sight as they age, etc.Claiming "disabled people" as a language choice follows a social theory of disability -- with the aim to get over the tendency to locate the causes of disablement in individuals and away from exclusionary social practices enacted everyday. Of course these naming practices are not universal but take place within cultural spaces of advocacy and paradigmatic shift negotiations.Yet, a social theory of disability can cross linguistic, geographic, and cultural borders to identify the barriers to inclusion that keep certain folks out of access to social resources and others right up front.As disability advocates repeat often, "Nothing about us without us." To what extent can we in disaster studies think similarly about vulnerability by carefully and always shifting causation from particular persons -- however different in different cultural contexts -- to the social practices that "make vulnerability"?On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 10:21 AM, David Hanson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Marla, I would agree but with a critical eye. Indeed, people would not want to be called 'vulnerable' or 'disabled' or be referred to as such. Perhaps an ideal alternative would be to call them 'survivors' or something more neutral/positive. Nevertheless, I believe that there is no bad publicity or controversy. A contested terms brings attention to the issues. I think the feminist movement and development researchers have benefited to an extent by using terms such as 'vulnerable' and 'poor'. Vulnerability, even if it is highly contested and means different things to different people, still evokes a sense of hurt, differential impact, risk, lack of resources, inequality, powerless etc.. Putting a positive or neutral spin on things may draw attention away from the issues at hand.Vulnerebel > vulnerable?--On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Marla Petal <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Thank you fro this.Perhaps we could nuance our language and take care not to refer to ”vulnerable people” - at all.For several reasons:1. individual people in these groups would take offense if they know that we are talking about them in this way.2. This ’shorthand’ in the English language clearly reinforces the error that this vulnerability is either intrinsic, or due to individual or group shortcomings.3. Just as people with different functional, communication and access needs (aka people with disabilities) have rejected being called ‘disabled people’, we could take this hint and refer to “people (or groups) of people made (or left) vulnerable” – esp. by denial/differential safeguarding of their human rights).Marla PetalOn Sep 29, 2015, at 6:25 PM, Lakshmi Fjord <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Avianto has identified an important paradox that occurs when disaster studies and policy rhetoric link the concept of vulnerability to categories of persons based on their natal population/"race," age, socioeconomic or immigrant or indigenous or disability status, gender, and more. It is this slippage I find troubling in some of the examples given in this thread, despite knowing the rhetorical aims (and their implementations) are to shift existing paradigms and foci by planners and policy makers.As the anthropologist Laura Nader pointed out ruefully to our discipline in the 1970s -- “Don’t study the poor and powerless, because everything you say about them will be used against them” (Nader in Dell Hymes’ Reinventing Anthropology, 1972).The paradoxical flip side is, as we all know and have advocated: the very people identified as "embodying vulnerability" are the most expert at identifying the nuts and bolts barriers they face everyday to full participatory citizenship. They are very creative and strategic with their resources, and their everyday negotiations of social and built barriers point to often low cost pre-planning that ought to be front-loaded instead of after-the-fact mop ups after deaths and destruction.It is easy to make these links for others outside our fields from key examples: curb cuts from sidewalks to roadways built for access of people using wheelchairs and now indispensable to local businesses loading and unloading, folks pushing strollers or bicycles, rolling suitcases... The link between the invention of the first (& most ergonomic) typewriter keyboard in Denmark by a teacher of the deaf (mid-1800s) to promote the literacy of deaf students who could not hear spoken language; TTYs (text messaging); videophones (Skype, etc); voice recognition (OK, we don't love verbal cueing our way through a phone queue, but Dragon anyone?); first transcribing pens, and on and on. All catalyzed by disablement experiences to now benefit and give communication ramps to everyone with access to them.In previous writing on the topic of reconstituting vulnerability by locating it in persons rather than systems and processes, one of my foci involves the levee failures that deluged mostly African American unevacuated residents of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina actually gave the city a pass-by. Who died: elderly disabled Black people. Justifications for delay of humanitarian for militarized responses rely on rhetorically mobilizing the disability concept. Black people in New Orleans were less able to "plan ahead," were "unable to act in a timely way," were unable to "act in a civilized manner, so looted while others died." All cognitive and developmental impairments, to shift focus from the Congressional environmental racism that de-funded levee construction and maintenance; the political racism that brought National Guard empty-handed except for weapons and appropriated for themselves the few relief supplies and transport that got through the barriers of water. We find recent resonances in apologists for Saudi Arabia's lack of trained personnel and preplanning that place blame on African Hajjis who bore the greatest losses by attributing whole-scale cognitive impairments to them.Now I am engaged as a participant observer in a further US federally-supported project where environmental racism arises in targeting whom shall forfeit clean air, water, and land in the "sacrificial zone" (gas industry term) for the super-sized fractured gas compressor station (4 X greater than other compressor stations - instead of 400,000 cubit feet a day of fracked gas propelled by engines, 1.4 billion cubit feet a day) proposed by Dominion Power acting as a limited liability company that applied to FERC (US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) to build the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP). Because the gas industry has been entirely successful in their advertising campaign that "gas is clean energy," such sacrifices are required of private citizens to secure domestic energy solutions. I don't need to elaborate that fractured gas shale reserves are from 96% lower in CA to a little more elsewhere than industry estimates; that the gas propelled by this super compressor station requires routine emissions of methane, Co2 and No2 at geometrically higher than already unsafe levels of smaller versions, is now intended for foreign sales at higher than domestic prices.The site for the 1 compressor station to cover the state of Virginia is a historically Black community, rural, majority elderly because of out-migration from no local jobs, disproportionately chronically ill, in Buckingham County. This geographically large, very rural county, is one of the poorest in the nation, with 25% living below the poverty line, 45% African American, many of whom are descended from people enslaved by white families in this county. They do not want activists against the ACP to talk about this as environmental racism. In their eloquently crafted statements, Union Hill community members use public health and environmental data to express concerns for anyone living in proximity to this project. This community has learned not to play "the race card," the "victim card" as individuals among them receive a few of the teaching or social work jobs available in a county whose revenues mostly come from resource extraction (clear-cutting forests, kyanite mine, slate quarry) and a prison.As both ethnographer and social justice activist, I navigate that razor's edge of how to discursively connect the dots for Virginia's Democratic state politicians, the governor and 2 senators who support the ACP, about their own legacies and this unacknowledged example of environmental racism and the wishes of this most impacted community.This is the discursive issue Ben raised and all of us ponder in our ongoing process of connecting the dots for those who make policies, who fund programs, who design and implement preparedness strategies and post-disaster responses. How do we use our data, bringing the science and social science together in grounded, meta-analytical concepts, without our work and words being "used against" the very people whose perspectives we try to foreground in public and governmental fora?Thank you for raising this rhetorical yet materially consequential issue in this thread,LakshmiLakshmi Fjord, PhDScholar-in-residence, Dept. of AnthropologyUniversity of VirginiaOn Mon, Sep 28, 2015 at 6:10 AM, Avianto Amri <[log in to unmask]> wrote:I echo Ilan's comments. The Sendai Framework has recognised the role of at-risk groups such as children, older persons and indigenous groups to play significant roles in reducing disaster risks. Eventually we will be facing grave challenge in translating and disseminating the message across all groups, especially to the most vulnerable.
Best regards,Anto--On Sun, Sep 27, 2015 at 3:45 PM, Ilan Kelman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Not all resilience is necessarily good, positive, or desirable:Ultimately, so much depends on the definitions used--which is Ben's point of ensuring that the definition is suitable for our ultimate aim. Both 'vulnerability' and 'resilience' have so many definitions given and applied that they could mean almost anything--and there will be a citation for it. Then, consider trying to translate these words into other languages and cultures; often, there is no translation, meaning, or description feasible.One more definition to add to the mix, expanded in some of the above papers with citations to the original work proposing this view, is to look at vulnerability and resilience as social processes. Considering the 'vulnerability process' and the 'resilience process' moves away from definitions which set up an artificial snapshot in space and time to aim for a static description.Best to everyone and thank you for this discussion,Ilan
From: Omar Dario Cardona A. Uniandes <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sunday, September 27, 2015 4:00 AM
Subject: Re: [RADIX] Sendai framework drags old HFA definition of vulnerability like Marley's ghost his chains!
Dear Ben,
Vulnerability has been a key concept to provide an epistemological framework
to disaster risk but also to other frameworks related to sustainibility,
development an adaptation. As predisposition and susceptibility it has been
very useful. As you know, the perpectives of taxonomies and underlying
causes or factors (also recently used as risk drivers) should be mantain but
the new draft terminology of UNISDR (with that definition) and the SFA
making only few references to the term are unfortunate. This is ironic
because there are now many followers of the concept due to the IPCC SREX
(Ch. 1 and 2) and the IPCC AR5, notwithstading they (the IPCC) have had
other approaches on vulnerability in the past.
I am sharing some of our frameworks thinking in the role of vulnerability to
explain risk and disaster from a holistic perspective and using a dynamic
systems approach (on an area or territory, national, subnational or local).
You know these contributions from many years ago. I agree it is necessary to
attempt keeping these approaches for risk understanding, including the lack
of resilience as a component of vulnerability (or not...) but looking for a
comprehensive view useful to identify the need of transformation and safety
taking a transdisciplinary perspective. The emphasis in resilience (e.g.
resilient cities...) and to leave vulnerability is clear in the UNISDR to
provide a positive term, but how much resilience is enough resilience? how
much safety is a enough safety? Vulnerability es very useful term to
complain...
All the best,
Omar-Dario
-----Mensaje original-----
From: Ben Wisner
Sent: Saturday, September 26, 2015 1:44 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Sendai framework drags old HFA definition of vulnerability like
Marley's ghost his chains!
Dear Radixers,
I sent the attached short reflection on how one defines 'vulnerability' to
folks at UNISDR on the eve of an inter-governmental meeting whose goal is to
consider the terminology used in disaster risk reduction with a view to
eventual common monitoring of the roll out of both the new Sendai Framework
of Action and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Words matter. Definitions (and corresponding models and framings) nudge
people to questions some things and to ignore others. I find, regrettably,
that on the eve of this meeting the technical review commissioned by UNISDR
recommends using a definition of 'vulnerability' that steers people away
from asking questions about power, about institutional failure and about
intentionality.
My note, attached, is a quick read. I'd appreciate feedback, and also, if
you are inclined, the diverse and deep experience of Radix participants
since its founding in 2001 provide a credible basis from which to urge the
UNISDR to take this opportunity to bring its definition of 'vulnerability'
up to data.
Thanks and warmest regards,
BEN
Dr. Ben Wisner
Aon-Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College London, UK
& Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania
& Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, USA
"People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."Avianto Amri (Mr.)
Disaster Risk Management Specialist
M: +61 416515720
Email: [log in to unmask] || Skype: avianto.amri
Alternate email: [log in to unmask]Cheers,
David Hanson
--Avianto Amri (Mr.)
Disaster Risk Management Specialist
M: +61 416515720
Email: [log in to unmask] || Skype: avianto.amri
Alternate email: [log in to unmask]Dr. Ben Wisner Aon-Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, University College London, UK & Sokoine University of Agriculture, Morogoro, Tanzania & Environmental Studies Program, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH, USA "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care."