Resilience and Communication (or Not)

The May 10, 2013 Chronicle Review's cover story is titled: Resilience: An Idea Takes Root. Authors  discuss post-catastrophic recuperation from various interdisciplinary perspectives. Whether from acts of nature, of the market, war, or terrorism scholars are labeling this new area Resilience Studies which includes "the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from, and more successfully adapt to events" (as defined by the National Academy of Sciences last year). In addition to several articles on the topic in this issue, the Review features a bibliography of recent books on the topic which I am posting in this blog for two reasons. One, maybe it's an interesting list of books to check out, and two, what's missing is a book on the topic from a communication perspective. And there is work in the areas of crisis and disaster communication.  If anyone would like to nominate a title from our field that should have been included feel free to tweet me (and I will append/retweet). Given that this is a hot area with established programs at Ohio State University (Center for Resilience) and research groups such as the Resilience Alliance, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and resilience programs at agencies like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the World Economic Forum (cyber resilience) and the Rockefeller Foundation (climate resilience), these are discourse and policy spaces more communication scholars might want to be wading into (to use a tsunami/flood metaphor).

Selected Works on Resilience, 2001-12

2012
Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges, by Steven M. Southwick and Dennis S. Charney (Cambridge University Press)
Resilience Practice: Building Capacity to Absorb Disturbance and Maintain Function, by Brian Walker and David Salt (Island Press)
Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, by Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy (Free Press)
2011
"Resilience: Thoughts on the Value of the Concept for Critical Gerontology," by Kirsty Wild, Janine L. Wiles, and Ruth E.S. Allen (Ageing & Society)
Resilience and Mental Health: Challenges Across the Lifespan, edited by Steven M. Southwick, Brett T. Litz, Dennis S. Charney, Matthew J. Friedman (Cambridge University Press)
2010
"Whatever Does Not Kill Us: Cumulative Lifetime Adversity, Vulnerability, and Resilience," by Mark D. Seery, E. Alison Holman, and Roxane Cohen Silver (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)
"Weighing the Costs of Disaster: Consequences, Risks, and Resilience in Individuals, Families, and Communities," by George A. Bonanno, Chris R. Brewin, Krzysztof Kaniasty, and Annette M. La Greca (Psychological Science in the Public Interest)
2009
Foundations of Ecological Resilience, edited by Lance H. Gunderson, Craig R. Allen, and C.S. Holling (Island Press)
2008
"Disaster Preparation and Recovery: Lessons From Research on Resilience in Human Development," by Ann S. Masten and Jelena Obradovic (Ecology and Sociology)
"Community Resilience as a Metaphor, Theory, Set of Capacities, and Strategy for Disaster Readiness," by Fran H. Norris, Susan P. Stevens, Betty Pfefferbaum, Karen F. Wyche, and Rose L. Pfefferbaum (American Journal of Community Psychology)
Thinking in Systems: A Primer, by Donella H. Meadows (Chelsea Green)
2006
Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World, by Brian Walker and David Salt (Island Press)
The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, by Thomas Homer-Dixon (Island Press)
Resilience Engineering: Concepts and Precepts, edited by Erik Hollnagel, David D. Woods, and Nancy Leveson (Ashgate Publishing)
2004
"Loss, Trauma and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive after Extremely Aversive Events?" by George A. Bonanno (American Psychologist)
2002
Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, edited by Lance H. Gunderson and C.S. Holling (Island Press)
2001
"Ordinary Magic: Resilience Processes in Development," by Ann S. Masten (American Psychologist)

May CommQuote

Our quote this month is from a review of two books in last month's Times Literary Supplement (April 12) by N.J. Enfield. 

"In Virtually You, the psychiatrist Elias Aboujaoude focuses on problems of the e-personality in the context of our new online world. Ranging from unchecked online aggression to loss of control over privacy to obsessive-compulsive behaviour, these problems stem from new affordances of the internet. It provides for real-time, fully networked social interaction, but with the curious property that the medium is essentially independent from our bodies. In this self-engineered environment, the physical body is rendered almost obsolete, still needed by its owner for little more than the sustenance that keeps the soul in play. It makes possible a new kind of self, Aboujaoude explains, and this new self is not all nice: "larger-than-life, convinced of its specialness, alternately dark and infantile, both compulsive and impulsive." The problem is that this new you, despite having become effectively separated from your body, is still you: "you still own it and own its consequences." You lose certain restrictions that once constrained your communicative power, but you don't lose your accountability. When your virtual branch breaks, it is the real you that comes crashing to the ground.

For Giles Slade [The Big Disconnect: The Story of Technology and Loneliness], our inventions are indeed the end of us. A virtue of his book is its fascinating account of the development of some key twentieth-century technologies, including radio, television and mass-produced guns. The dehumanizing effect of technology is well illustrated, for example, in the observation that men in uniform can be effectively interchangeable, like factory-made machine parts. People can serve as tools; and "machines", by which he mostly means people-isolating devices such as the Sony Walkman and its descendants, have become "prosthetic substitutes for human company." For Slade, twentieth-century musical culture went from "communicative" to "lonely and isolating"; people are now "predisposed to feel more comfortable with human contact when it is mediated by machinery;" and we have given up "the traditional activity of trusting and interacting with other humans." But if this were really so, social life would have collapsed completely. Slade's arguments would be easier to follow if it were clear what he really wanted to say.

A difficulty for both Slade and Aboujaoude is that while they are ostensibly addressing human problems, their sample of humankind is a distinctly thin slice. When Slade writes of "traditional society" and "pre-modern society," it turns out he means the societies of eighteenth- and nineteenth century North America. But of course these people had all sorts of technology. They were already immersed in the prosthetic human future. They possessed, for example, the technology known as the book. While Slade worries that post-twentieth-century electronic media compromise the natural framework for human communication because they strip away certain features of face-to-face interaction, such as our ability to see others' facial expressions, this compromise was surely initiated centuries earlier. A book is no more natural to human communication than a chat room or a Twitter feed; maybe less so."

E-Resource News: Handbook of Social Psychology

The Handbook of Social Psychology (Fifth Edition), a foundational classic for anyone in the social sciences, is now available online from Penn Libraries E-Resources.

Since the first edition was published in 1935, the Handbook of Social Psychology has been the standard reference work in the field, offering historic, integrative, and pene­trating surveys of the topics that constitute the discipline. This two-volume Fifth Edition reflects the tremendous changes the field has experienced in the last decade and continues to be an indispensable resource for students and scholars alike, with all-new chapters written by the world’s foremost authorities on each topic and a list of contributors that reads like an international Who’s Who in Social Psychology.  --Publisher's statement

The work is divided into three sections: Part I: The Science of Social Psychology; Part II: The Social Being; and Part III: The Social World.  The Social Being section includes topics like motivation, attitude formation and persuasion, gender issues, social cognitive neuroscience and nonverbal behavior.  The Social World section includes social psychology and language, political behavior, inter group relations, conflict, and cultural psychology. That's a very incomplete set of examples--I'm just honing in on some key areas for our field that students starting out, not to mention ones taking comps soon(!), might want to download for their permanent reference

 Other new E-Resource reference book additions you might want to check out: 

Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization
 http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/110208

The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology
http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/109695 

International Studies Encyclopedia Online
http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/109692 

Africa Yearbook Online
http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/109331 

African Studies Companion
http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/11470

Special issues from Journalism and Journalism Studies

The latest Journalism and Journalism Studies are both running interesting themed issues. 

Journalism Studies (Volume 14, Issue 2, 2013) addresses the issue of cosmopolitanism in today's new media landscape. 
Cosmopolitanism, the issue argues, is an orientation of openness towards distant others that relies on technological mediation so as to raise the moral imperative to act on those others in the name of common humanity (Silverstone2007). Whilst cosmopolitanism has long been associated with the capacity of journalism to bring “home” distant realities and to inspire a sense of care and responsibility beyond our communities of belonging (Hannerz 1990), the emergence of new media and their appropriation in citizen-driven practices of reporting has invigorated debates about the cosmopolitan efficacy of journalism today (Ward 2010; Zuckerman 2010). New media journalism refers to a broad economy of integrated technological mediations, what Madianou (this issue) calls a “polymedia” milieu, which “comprises of technologies, media, platforms and applications as they intersect and hybridise”, circulating information but also facilitating opinion and testimony. Within this milieu, it is, in particular, the intervention of ordinary voice into journalism, made possible through these polymedia affordances (from Twitter to mobile phones), that appears to catalyse the cosmopolitan efficacy. Insofar as events can be reported by people like us, the argument has it, the news can become both more authentic towards its own publics and more caring towards distant others (Allan 2007; Harcup 2002). --from the Introduction

Articles include:

• ONLINE JOURNALISM AND CIVIC COSMOPOLITANISM: Professional vs . participatory ideals, by Dahlgren P.

• COSMOPOLITANISM AS CONFORMITY AND CONTESTATION: The mainstream press and radical politics, by Fenton N.

• SITUATED, EMBODIED AND POLITICAL: Expressions of citizen journalism, by Blaagaard B. B.

• GETTING CLOSER?: Encounters of the national media with global images, by Pantti.

• THE WORLD IS WATCHING: The mediatic structure of cosmopolitanism, by Cheah P.

• JOURNALISTS WITNESSING DISASTER: From the calculus of death to the injunction to care, by Cottle S.

• HUMANITARIAN CAMPAIGNS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: Network architectures and polymedia events, by Madianou M.
  RE-MEDIATION, INTER-MEDIATION, TRANS-MEDIATION: The cosmopolitan trajectories of convergent journalism, by Chouliaraki.

Journalism's special issue (Volume 14, Issue 2, 2013) is: Journalism and the Financial Crisis. Articles include:

• Financial journalism, news sources and the banking crisis, by Paul Manning

• Budgetjam! A communications intervention in the political - economic crisis in Ireland, by Gavan Titley

• Ignored , uninterested , and the blame game : How The New York Times , Marketplace , and The Street distanced themselves from preventing the 2007-2009 financial crisis, by Nikki Usher

• The Today programme and the banking crisis, by Mike Berry

• Are we all Keynesians now? The US press and the American Recovery Act of 2009, by Anya Schiffrin

• Downloading disaster: BBC news online coverage of the global financial crisis, by Steve Schifferes

• Financial news and market panics in the age of high - frequency sentiment trading algorithms, by Jan Kleinnijenhuis

• Invested interests? Reflexivity, representation and reporting in financial markets, by Peter A Thompson