Integrative resilience in action: Stories from the frontlines of climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic

Interest in resilience and vulnerability has grown remarkably over the last decade, yet discussions about the two continue to be fragmented and increasingly ill-equipped to respond to the complex challenges that systemic crises such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic pose to people, places, and the planet. Institutional interventions continue to lag behind, remaining predominantly focused on technocratic framings of vulnerability and resilience that do not lead to a more robust engagement with the reality of the changes that are underway. This paper provides a blueprint for facilitating intersectional resilience outcomes that ensure that as a society we are not merely surviving a crisis, but are committing to interventions that place equity, solidarity, and care at the center of healthy adaptation and wellbeing. First, it traces the evolution of resilience from a strictly ecological concept to its uptake as a socio-ecological framework for urban resilience planning. Next, it argues that current framings of vulnerability should be expanded to inform interventions that are locally relevant, responsive, and “bioecological.” The integrative resilience model is then introduced in the second half of the paper to challenge the scope of formal resilience plans while providing an entry point for renewed forms of resistance and recovery in the age of neoliberalism-fueled systemic crisis. The three pillars of the model are discussed alongside a selection of scalable and adaptable community-driven projects that bring this approach to life on the ground. By being rooted in lived experience, these innovative initiatives amplify and advance the work of frontline communities who are challenging and resisting the neoliberalization not only of urban governance and resilience, but of wellbeing and (self-) care more broadly. Copyright © 2022 Camponeschi.

Healing Justice: A Framework for Collective Healing and Well-Being from Systemic Traumas

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the United States demanded police reform and legislative action. Data-driven policing is just one technological intervention designed with the hope to tackle police brutality. However, these design interventions are often rooted in the continued racial profiling of poor and socially marginalized communities. Designers and researchers need a Healing Justice framework to circumvent this harm. Healing Justice addresses generational trauma and violence in marginalized communities and is not just a framework for policing but can address maternal mortality rates, COVID-19, medical malpractice, and other trauma issues. In this paper, we apply a Healing Justice framework to co-design activities focused on police brutality. We bridge Healing Justice and design by using an Afrofuturist Feminism framework, arguing that Healing Justice and Afrofuturist feminism frameworks lead to collective, grassroots, and pragmatic designs. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Teaching and Learning During A Pandemic: How one Graduate Community Psychology Class Quickly Incorporated Healing Justice Into Our Practices.

In this first-person account, we describe the changes we made to align our graduate student-level community psychology class with a healing justice model. We undertook this intervention because the class started in March, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic stay-at-home directive in our region. We describe the facets of a healing justice model, which promotes radical healing and collective action in a trauma-informed environment. We then discuss the changes we made to the class to better align with healing justice, including how enrolled students (i.e., co-authors) experienced the process of the course (e.g., reworking the syllabus, starting class with check-ins and an exercise to engage our parasympathetic nervous systems), as well as the content of the course (e.g., service projects to support people who are undocumented, unhoused, or minoritized in other ways; photovoice). We end with implications for teaching community psychology, including the importance of universal design, and for scholar-activist PhD programs.