Stories, contingent materialities, and moral inquiry: Response to Simone, MacLeavy, Kim and Lake

In response to the thoughtful and generous commentaries of Simone, MacLeavy, Kim, and Lake in my paper “Bubble Clash,” I lay out three considerations for social inquiry and knowledge production. First, learning from MacIntyre’s discussion of Jane Austen, whose stories exemplify an imaginative moral inquiry in which different rationalities and virtues collide, I highlight the role of stories in moral progress in which our sensitivity and responsiveness to people and things are increased. Second, I expand on Simone’s and MacLeavy’s notion of contingent materialities that mandate storytellers’ work to be always in progress and “in the middle.” I connect this line of thought with Kim’s “dreamscapes” of the municipalities in Georgia where the past, present, and future are being spatially materialized, the examples of which include the continuing legacies of institutional anti-Blackness concurrently existing with immigrants’ growing physical predominance in “White-fled” areas. Finally, I return to Lake’s pragmatism and its emphasis on moral inquiry. No matter how complex, ungraspable, and perturbing the world may seem, the wisdom of pragmatism invites us to start from questioning the purpose of our writing act: why do we write and for whom do we write

Bubble clash: Identity, environment, and politics in a multicultural suburb.

The purpose of article is to examine whether the current feminist philosophies in the intersection of identity, politics and the environment can have practical purchase in urban problem-solving. My argument is mobilised using the story of Greater Dandenong, a multicultural suburb approximately 30km south-east of Melbourne's central business district. This suburb witnessed what I call a ‘bubble clash.’ In recent years, Greater Dandenong has experienced an ecological problem: its seagull population has increased, causing community conflicts over how to manage it. These conflicts have been fought between insular, closed (i.e. bubble) groups. One effect of this ‘bubble clash’ has been that it is incredibly difficult to develop a communal agreement between groups with very different outlooks. Feminist theory has, historically, provided significant resources for understanding this kind of situation. In the article, I review feminist political philosophies – drawing on Iris Young, Patricia H. Collins and Elizabeth Grosz – that help us understand how identity and urban politics relate. My contribution is to add a pragmatic supplement to this body of work. Extending beyond the interpretation of multiculturalism in which ‘differences’ in our identities are given an a priori quality, I propose a ‘transitionist pragmatist perspective’ that (a) reframes how we understand context and contingency in the ongoing formation of subjectivities and their ideals and (b) seeks to trace the history of problematic situations specifically through the lens of problem-solving

Perceptions and Reactions to Tornado Warning Polygons: Would a Gradient Polygon Be Useful?

To better understand interpretations of National Weather tornado warning polygons, 145 participants were shown 22 hypothetical scenarios in one of four displays deterministic polygon, deterministic polygon + radar image, gradient polygon, and gradient polygon + radar image. Participants judged each numerical strike probability (ps ) and reported the likelihood of taking seven different response actions. The deterministic polygon display produced ps that were highest at the centroid and declined in all directions from there. The deterministic polygon + radar display, the gradient polygon display, and the gradient polygon + radar display produced ps that were high at the centroid and also at its edge nearest the tornadic storm cell. Overall, ps values were negatively related to resuming normal activities, but positively correlated with expectations of resuming normal activities, seeking information from social sources, seeking shelter, and evacuating by car. These results replicate the finding that participants make more appropriate ps judgments when polygons are presented in their natural context of radar images than when the polygons are presented in isolation and that gradient displays appear to provide no appreciable benefit. The fact that ps judgments had moderately positive correlations with both sheltering (a generally appropriate response) and evacuation (a generally inappropriate response) provides experimental confirmation that people threatened by actual tornadoes are conflicted about which protective action to take

Perceptions and Expected Immediate Reactions to Severe Storm Displays

The National Weather Service has adopted warning polygons that more specifically indicate the risk area than its previous county-wide warnings. However, these polygons are not defined in terms of numerical strike probabilities (ps). To better understand people’s interpretations of warning polygons, 167 participants were shown 23 hypothetical scenarios in one of three information conditions—polygon-only (Condition A), polygon + tornadic storm cell (Condition B), and polygon + tornadic storm cell + flanking nontornadic storm cells (Condition C). Participants judged each polygon’s ps and reported the likelihood of taking nine different response actions. The polygon-only condition replicated the results of previous studies; ps was highest at the polygon’s centroid and declined in all directions from there. The two conditions displaying storm cells differed from the polygon-only condition only in having ps just as high at the polygon’s edge nearest the storm cell as at its centroid. Overall, ps values were positively correlated with expectations of continuing normal activities, seeking information from social sources, seeking shelter, and evacuating by car. These results indicate that participants make more appropriate ps judgments when polygons are presented in their natural context of radar displays than when they are presented in isolation. However, the fact that ps judgments had moderately positive correlations with both sheltering (a generally appropriate response) and evacuation (a generally inappropriate response) suggests that experiment participants experience the same ambivalence about these two protective actions as people threatened by actual tornadoes

Behavioral Response in the Immediate Aftermath of Shaking: Earthquakes in Christchurch and Wellington, New Zealand, and Hitachi, Japan

This study examines people’s response actions in the first 30 min after shaking stopped following earthquakes in Christchurch and Wellington, New Zealand, and Hitachi, Japan. Data collected from 257 respondents in Christchurch, 332 respondents in Hitachi, and 204 respondents in Wellington revealed notable similarities in some response actions immediately after the shaking stopped. In all four events, people were most likely to contact family members and seek additional information about the situation. However, there were notable differences among events in the frequency of resuming previous activities. Actions taken in the first 30 min were weakly related to: demographic variables, earthquake experience, contextual variables, and actions taken during the shaking, but were significantly related to perceived shaking intensity, risk perception and affective responses to the shaking, and damage/infrastructure disruption. These results have important implications for future research and practice because they identify promising avenues for emergency managers to communicate seismic risks and appropriate responses to risk area populations

Reframing postmodern planning with feminist social theory: Toward “anti-essentialist norms”

This article is concerned with the current developments in planning theory literature, with regard to its extensive focus on flexibility and process. When emphasizing the open-endedness and procedural validity of planning, planning theorists do not seem to consider ethical considerations about the results of planning outcomes. This is understandable given that postmodernism and its ardent defense of “open-endedness” is often considered to contradict any prescriptive nuances. However, I argue that normativity of planning is possible within the postmodern paradigm and that postmodern concepts and theoretical standpoints can propose a basis for normativity. To demonstrate this, I adopt the works of political theorists who have addressed normativity and political solidarity within the postmodern paradigm (anti-essentialist, anti-Cartesian), most of whom are inspired by the future paths of feminism. To be clear, what I refer as “feminism” is about not only defending the status of women as a legal category, but also how to construct political solidarity against inequalities—without essentialist categorizations or a priori conceptualizations. Using the ideas of Young (second-/third-wave feminism), Laclau and Mouffe (post-Marxism), Mouffe (post-Marxism/third-wave feminism), and Butler (third-wave feminism/body politics), I outline what could be considered “anti-essentialist norms.” Based on these norms, a planner can judge which people and whose voices—which social groups or “serial collectives”—should be prioritized and heard first, in order to promote a more inclusive and just urban space. The three anti-essentialist norms that I propose are (1) taking into account the historicity of social relations, (2) having a modest attitude toward what we claim as the representation of “the public,” and (3) recognizing a human interdependency that leads to pursuing future-orientedness in a political project

Lake-ian pragmatism and the path to engaged practice

Bob Lake’s writing traces a route from positivism to pragmatism, from market dominance to political possibility, from coercion to persuasion, and from consolatory escapism to engaged practice. His work inspires us to embark on an engaged practice that not only questions the worth of “spectator knowledge” but also reinstitutes the purpose of our everyday participation as members of the academic community. Lake is an anti-essentialist who finds the meaning of knowledge production in interhuman communication and collective engendering of communal values. This has led his work to constantly question the predetermined a priori worldviews, epistemologies, and ideological umbrellas that often occlude the actual realities that real social actors continue to reshape and reinvent. His incessant questioning is not born out of contrarian vanity. Rather, it encourages us to develop and practice habits of creative democracy in our everyday actions of love, care, and solidarity

Planning in postmodern era: navigating normativity and political implications of ‘planning for/in uncertainty’

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018This dissertation primarily aims to address the question of what should be “the role of public policy/planning” in today’s era of uncertainty, compounded by climate change and natural hazards events in addition to ever-diverging socio-economic inequalities. In the first chapter, I proposed a set of “anti-essentialist norms” in planning, based on which planning practitioners can gauge whose voices and interests should be prioritized in the midst of the conflicts amongst different social groups and movements. To do so, I drew theoretical insights from third-wave feminist social theorists who have explored for a long time where to find a source of political solidarity that goes beyond the fixed categorization of gender. The second chapter, on the other hand, aimed to develop and promote more progressive use of the ‘resilience’ concept in disaster planning, by a thorough examination on the history and use of the concept across different disciplines. I have proposed that more emphasis on co-constitutive human-nature relationship as well as focusing on the collective aspects of resilience building can move us forward towards the progressive articulation of resilience theory, going beyond the pessimistic critique on resilience as “offloading of responsibilities”. Finally, the third chapter subsequently argued for the progressive potentials of resilience in disaster planning in practice — comparing the cases of Seattle and Paris. Based on eleven in-depth key informant interviews with practitioners in the field, I have demonstrated how resilience can become a source of empowerment and innovation for local governments to effectuate a more inclusive, participatory risk governance model. In the end, my dissertation was an effort to converge “social problems” and “ecological problems” in public policy — by outlining planners’ role in addressing social inequality on the one hand (Chapter 1), and yet at the same time proposing the possibilities of “resilience” or “emancipatory catastrophism” where our changing relationship with nature calls for the rise of solidarity and collective actions — represented as increasing local initiatives and more inclusive knowledge practices (Chapter 3)