Scott Davis, RECOMS fellow, made a new blog with the title Community Eco-Stories: The Power of Local Narratives in Response to Environmental Risk. In his blog post, Scott aims to investigate place attachment and community empowerment in an age of uncertainty.
Scott Davis, RECOMS fellow started his blog early this year on his research. In his words, the blog is "about local environments and spaces, which are changing at pace, therefore how communities’ feel attached to, and responsible for adjusting their places, is also constantly evolving. At a governance level, there is a social policy drive for “stronger communities” often under the banner of community resilience. Governments are requesting communities to participate more in society and therefore become more ‘’resilient’’ through taking responsibility for their local environments. However, the creation of an authentically “bottom up” community resilience strategy can be elusive for policy makers who are used to more rationalistic, top down, indicator-based solutions.
This research explores a potential community resilience strategy in the context of local people that experience or susceptible to environmental risk (e.g. earthquakes, rising sea levels). Investigating the emergence of local narratives and the effects these narratives can have on place attachment and whether this process of local narrative creation can mobilize citizens to participate in future decisions affecting their locality. The research takes an ethnographic, case study approach with communities in the Netherlands and abroad who are creating local narratives in collaboration with local artists".
The blog posts so far aim to discover displaced people's stories in Rotterdam as well as investigating in more philosophical depth about rationality in public discourse. Check out Scott's blog here!