The Canterbury earthquakes of 2010-2012 have been generation shaping. People living and working in and around the city during this time have had their lives and social landscapes changed forever. The earthquake response, recovery and rebuild efforts have highlighted unheralded social strengths and vulnerabilities within individuals, organisations, communities and country writ large. It is imperative that the social sciences stand up to be counted amongst the myriad of academic research, commentary and analysis.
The Canterbury earthquakes and the rebuild are generation-defining events for twenty-first century Aotearoa/ New Zealand. This article uses an actor network approach to explore 32 women’s narratives of being shaken into dangerous disaster situations and reconstituting themselves to cope in socially innovative ways. The women’s stories articulate on-going collective narratives of experiencing disaster and coping with loss in ‘resilient’ ways. In these women’s experiences, coping in disasters is not achieved by talking through the emotional trauma. Instead, coping comes from seeking solace through engagement with one’s own and others’ personal risk and resourcefulness in ways that feed into the emergence of socially innovative voluntary organisations. These stories offer conceptual insight into the multivalent interconnections between resilience and vulnerabilities and the contested nature of post-disaster recovery in Aotearoa/New Zealand. These women gave voice to living through disasters resiliently in ways that forged new networks of support across collective and personal narratives and broader social goals and aspirations for Aotearoa/New Zealand’s future.
INTRODUCTION: After the 2011 Canterbury earthquake, the provision of school social work was extended into a larger number of schools in the greater Christchurch region to support discussions of their practice priorities and responses in post-earthquake schools. FINDINGS: Two main interpretations of need are reflected in the school social workers’ accounts of their work with children and families. Firstly, hardship-focused need, which represented children as adversely influenced by their home circumstances; the interventions were primarily with parents. These families were mainly from schools in low socioeconomic areas. Secondly, anxiety-based need, a newer practice response, which emphasised children who were considered particularly susceptible to the impacts of the disaster event. This article considers how these practitioners conceptualised and responded to the needs of the children and their families in this context. METHOD: A qualitative study examining recovery policy and school social work practice following the earthquakes including 12 semi-structured interviews with school social workers. This article provides a Foucauldian analysis of the social worker participants’ perspectives on emotional and psychological issues for children, particularly those from middle-class families; the main interventions were direct therapeutic work with children themselves. Embedded within these practice accounts are moments in which the social workers contested the predominant, individualising conceptualisations of need to enable more open-ended, negotiable, interconnected relationships in post-earthquake schools. IMPLICATIONS: In the aftermath of disasters, school social workers can reflect on their preferred practice responses and institutional influences in schools to offer children and families opportunities to reject the prevalent norms of risk and vulnerability.
Following a disaster, an organisation’s ability to recover is influenced by its internal capacities, but also by the people, organisations, and places to which it is connected. Current approaches to organisational resilience tend to focus predominantly on an organization's internal capacities and do not adequately consider the place-based contexts and networks in which it is embedded. This thesis explores how organisations’ connections may both hinder and enable organisational resilience. Organisations in the Canterbury region of New Zealand experienced significant and repeated disruptions as a result of two major earthquakes and thousands of aftershocks throughout 2010 and 2011. This thesis draws upon 32 case studies of organisations located in three severely damaged town centres in Canterbury to assess the influence that organisations’ place-based connections and relational networks had on their post-earthquake trajectories. The research has four objectives: 1) to examine the ways organisations connected to their local contexts both before and after the earthquakes, 2) to explore the characteristics of the formal and informal networks organisations used to aid their response and recovery, 3) to identify the ways organisations’ connections to their local contexts and support networks influenced their ability to recover following the earthquakes, and finally, 4) to develop approaches to assess resilience that consider these extra-organisational connections. The thesis contests the fiction that organisations recover and adapt independently from their contexts following disasters. Although organisations have a set of internal capacities that enable their post-disaster recovery, they are embedded within external structures that constrain and enable their adaptive options following a disaster. An approach which considers organisations’ contexts and networks as potential sources of organisational resilience has both conceptual and practical value. Refining our understanding of the influence of extra-organisational connections can improve our ability to explain variability in organisational outcomes following disasters and foster new ways to develop and manage organisational resilience.
A Transitional Imaginary: Space, Network and Memory in Christchurch is the outcome and the record of a particular event: the coming together of eight artists and writers in Ōtautahi Christchurch in November 2015, with the ambitious aim to write a book collaboratively over five days. The collaborative process followed the generative ‘book sprint’ method founded by our facilitator for the event, Adam Hyde, who has long been immersed in digital practices in Aotearoa. A book sprint prioritises the collective voice of the participants and reflects the ideas and understandings that are produced at the time in which the book was written, in a plurality of perspectives. Over one hundred books have been completed using the sprint methodology, covering subjects from software documentation to reflections on collaboration and fiction. We chose to approach writing about Ōtautahi Christchurch through this collaborative process in order to reflect the complexity of the post-quake city and the multiple paths to understanding it. The city has itself been a space of intensive collaboration in the post-disaster period. A Transitional Imaginary is a raw and immediate record, as much felt expression as argued thesis. In many ways the process of writing had the character of endurance performance art. The process worked by honouring the different backgrounds of the participants, allowing that dialogue and intensity could be generative of different forms of text, creating a knowledge that eschews a position of authority, working instead to activate whatever anecdotes, opinions, resources and experiences are brought into discussion. This method enables a dynamic of voices that merge here, separate there and interrupt elsewhere again. As in the contested process of rebuilding and reimagining Christchurch itself, the dissonance and counterpoint of writing reflects the form of conversation itself. This book incorporates conflict, agreement and the activation of new ideas through cross-fertilisation to produce a new reading of the city and its transition. The transitional has been given a specific meaning in Christchurch. It is a product of local theorising that encompasses the need for new modes of action in a city that has been substantially demolished (Bennett & Parker, 2012). Transitional projects, such as those created by Gap Filler, take advantage of the physical and social spaces created by the earthquake through activating these as propositions for new ways of being in the city. The transitional is in motion, looking towards the future. A Transitional Imaginary explores the transitional as a way of thinking and how we understand the city through art practices, including the digital and in writing.
