Project Details
Projekt
Radical Resilience. Encountering Flood Policies, Knowledge Formations and Climate Transformation Processes in Ho Chi Minh City.
Applicant
Kathrin Eitel
Subject Area
Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 511266686
Coastal cities such as Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam are particularly affected by climate change due to flooding and rising sea levels. In view of future threat scenarios, resilient policies are the new key element of urban policy. They aim to strengthen a city's adaptive capacity to climate shocks, but often disregard existing resilience practices ‘on the ground’. At the same time, international ‘political templates’ for flood protection measures that provide a certain body of knowledge about how best to deal with floods are often unreflectively implemented at the national level. Anthropological studies have pointed out this disparity between policy, local practice, and ‘travelling’ knowledge, but there only are few ethnographic studies in Southeast Asian cities – and none for Vietnam – that examine the linkages in regard to climate-related transformation processes in cities. In this context, the project aims to understand the multiple connections between local practices of flood control, the power of knowledge productions and inscribed worldviews, and flood policy in Vietnamese coastal regions. Through a multi-sited ethnography, the project aims to develop a more comprehensive understanding of how resilience and transformation are linked and whether and how cities can become more resilient by adopting a participatory approach to resilience. In this context, the Radical Resilience project will first analyze the production of knowledge about ‘resilience’ and identify the worldviews inscribed in this process. Second, the project will examine the impacts that these policies and their ‘outcomes’ e.g., such as technological flood prevention megaprojects, may have on the life and livelihood of vulnerable urban dwellers such as women. Finally, alternative forms of knowledge, that become also visible through climate-related activism, and their transformative potential for the (future) city will be identified. As the project’s ambition is to provide a comprehensive picture of participatory urban resilience, it approaches the field in a co-laborative way in terms of knowledge production and dissemination. It aims to conceptualize an approach to resilience by mobilizing and feeding its findings back into the field – the root of participatory resilience. In doing so, the project contributes to the emerging field of anthropology of policies, critical urban studies, and social science climate research, as well as it offers innovative developments in collaborative research. In times of anthropogenic climate change, this research is of great importance because, on the one hand, it provides genuine and in-depth insights into cities and their very different ways of dealing with floods. On the other hand, its approach, which crosses social strata within the field as well as sectors and research disciplines beyond, contributes to a holistic approach to understand resilience and the city in a participatory way while doing research responsibly.
DFG Programme
WBP Fellowship
International Connection
Italy, Japan, Vietnam
