What's Care got to Do With It? : Drinking Games vs Resiliency

Mitch Stripling (: 00:00

You know what I've thinking about a lot recently? What? Ayn Rand. Okay. Didn't see that one coming. Carry on. I mean, the thing about Ayn Rand is that, you know, classically, she's like, don't care about anybody else. Don't take care of anyone, right? Objectivism. Just totally look out for yourself all the time, except there's an exception to this. Did you know this? I did not know this. The exception is emergencies.

She actually wrote this essay called Ethics in Emergencies that says, hey, you know what? If you're in an emergency with somebody, it is okay to care for them.

Wow, permission from Ayn Rand to care for other It's crazy. And she's literally like, this is the only time, y'all. Don't do it any other situation. But if you're on a ship and the ship is sinking and you want to save some people, it's OK. Do you know what's amazing? What? That's better than Kant. Really? Yeah. Kant is like, if your ship is going down, you can kill other people. So you guys, we have just found the amazing moment where Ayn Rand is like, ship's going down, save some people. And Kant's like, or kill them.

It's fine. You're learning something every minute on this show with us. And it's great because this episode is about this question. It's about how you care for each other, in what ways can you care for each other, the ethics of caring for each other during disasters and what that means.

We're so excited that we get to have Sarah Clark Miller on who's an associate professor at Penn State. She works on women's issues, gender issues. Jordan could do her bio like hands down much better than I could. Well, she's a philosopher. Right, yeah. So that's just true of all y'all, I think, in the little cult that you guys have.

She wrote a great book called The Ethics of Need, Agency, Dignity, and Obligation. And she also wrote a great essay at the beginning of COVID-19, a lot of good work on this question of what we owe each other, our moral obligations to each other. And also, not to be outdone, Jason Rivera, who's an associate professor and the chair of the Department of Public Management at John Jay College right here in New York City, who's an award-winning emergency management scholar, who's a scholar who thinks about social equity in emergencies.

and how that should work formally, how our systems of emergency management can do a better job taking care of people during disasters. We recorded this, actually it's important to say, last year in the fall. Time got away from us a little bit. The world's been a little chaotic since then. And anything else you want to say to set this one up?

Well, I think the question of how we care for one another is maybe even more urgent in this political moment, but we didn't know where we would be when we recorded this episode. you know, the thing about it is care is always difficult in emergencies. It's never easy. And so whenever you can do it, you need tools for figuring out how to do it. And it turns out who's good at that? Ayn Rand. But probably who's better is actually Sarah Clark Miller and Jason Rivera.

super excited to dive into this conversation.

so excited to have both of you all here

Jason Rivera (: 03:11

How you guys doing?

Sarah Clark Miller (: 03:11

Yeah,

happy to be here.

Jordan, do you have a beverage of choice with you?

Jordan Pascoe (: 03:16

do. It is in a mason jar. It is quite watered down because I may or may not be still recovering from a hangover from the weekend.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 03:24

Hair of the dog, hair of the dog, all good.

Jason Rivera (: 03:26

Well, here we go.

Mitch Stripling (: 03:27

Now that we've got our beverages, we're ready to play the epistemology drinking game. So I want everybody on point for that. And I want to start off with you, Sarah, if you could kind of get us into this, maybe by talking about your experience of care in the pandemic and...

and what it meant and the kinds of things that you saw as a philosopher when you were sort of watching that experience unfold.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 03:50

I mean, I'll start from a personal perspective and a kind of humorous self -aware perspective. So I work in philosophy. I'm also a bioethicist. I'm interested in public health. as COVID -19 was unfolding, I had thought a lot about what it would be like to be in a pandemic, perhaps more than was actually healthy or normal. so, you know, so like when I was gathering and amassing all of the toilet paper, right, my friends were like, why? And then,

Two months later, they were like, knock, knock, knock. Do you have some extra roles? And I was like, see, we are ready. So I I had thought a lot about it. And I had thought a lot about the ways in which care might take place, right? And kind of ideal forms of care that would hold. And I think initially we did OK, because we were in crisis mode. And so in crisis mode, you can have kind of

crisis care response, right? But over time it wore down. And so there was an initial surging of awareness of interdependence and relational support, and that was awesome. And then we had to keep going and there weren't tremendous care reserves and there was no real care infrastructure, right? So it had to be self -motivated and that proved very difficult. And I'll point out just to be utterly cheery that we are still in the pandemic.

Long COVID is a thing. There is still support that's necessary. And I'm hopeful that there can be continued transformation, right, where care can become a kind of constant and not something that we turn to in moments of crisis.

Jordan Pascoe (: 05:28

Sarah, think one thing that's really useful about what you just pointed to is the way in which this mirrors how we do care in this country generally, which is that you're right, we're really good at care in sort of like immediate senses. And this is often what I think politicians are pointing to when they talk about like family values, sorts of things, right? This kind of like immediate surface level care. But yeah, this question of like care reserves and care infrastructure, like the larger systems that support that.

care is really where things fall apart. And I like the distinction between, know, we talk a lot in the book about the crisis of caregiving and COVID -19, but there was also crisis care, which is a slightly different thing, right? Which is the kind of sort of like the way that we're able to surge caregiving in like small immediate ways in moments of crisis. Yeah.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 06:18

Yeah.

Yeah. And so the kind crisis care, I think, had to respond to this crisis of caregiving. mean, it's sort of they related. And I think, so right, we need better infrastructure. But interestingly, Jordan, responding to one part of what you said, I think we really need to understand care as decentralized from the family, right? Like the CIS -HET or normative family structure, where, yes, we want it to be strong there, but it what

what's really needed is care that happens with friends and family and extended kinship. And so that's something I think a lot about these days.

Mitch Stripling (: 06:55

So Jason, this question of caregiving and the question of sort of especially in a societal sense, how public administrators care, how emergency managers get, like the work that we do to take care of society, something that you've written about a lot. And I wonder if you can talk about this issue in COVID -19 that Sarah and Jordan are bringing up, you know, this question of immediate sort of social care, all of us feel this impulse, and then it gradually dies away.

What's the societal response doing at this time? How did we do as a society responding? Did we show care in our broader emergency response structures?

Jason Rivera (: 07:30

I mean, from a societal point of view, I believe that as Sarah already pointed out, initially there was a lot of really comprehensive care that spread across a lot of different social groups, a lot of different subpopulations, not only in this country, but across the world. But over time, I think either through attrition of just COVID and people getting tired,

but also the mixed messaging we had from different political agencies, different political figures, really started to take a toll on not only how emergency managers deal with the situation, but how we as the public could actually, or what we should do, right? And so, for example, with the whole notion of going to get vaccinated.

One of the things that we were looking at or we were looking at at one point was, well, how does trust in political figures or trust in agencies impact whether or not someone personally elects to go get vaccinated? And unfortunately, a lot of it is based on who is talking. Was it Biden? Was it Fauci? Was it CDC? Or was it, for example, President Trump? And depending on who was providing the message, elicited

well, what the response would be. And as many of you know, a lot of it was based along party lines or political ideological lines. Individuals that ascribe to Republican, generally speaking Republican views ended up not getting or following the messages that were being put out by the CDC and the like. Now, subsequent to that, I think what we see is also an idea of what it means

when you go and provide services of care to different populations and what the outcome is to those populations when they're provided, right? So you have people like Dee Dee Bennet -Gale, who had a recent book around emergency management's response to the COVID pandemic and how issues of equity played out in the response by different agencies. And what we see is, and what is interesting in my research now is,

Many emergency managers don't want to have this conversation around social equity of response, social equity of service provision, because they think it makes things more difficult, makes things more or less efficient to think about these things in the context of acting. And so how did we operate as a society? think as Sarah had started to allude to this notion of the importance of social networks,

The idea that we've been talking about in, you name this, academic discipline at this point, social capital, right? And the various elements or designs of social capital. I think initially there was this very big focus on bonding social capital, right? The family and your immediate kinship groups. But as I think over time we started to notice, we cannot rely on that, right? But...

I think what's also problematic is within the agencies that respond to disasters or even, for example, the Red Cross or the Salvation Army, there's a lot of rhetoric around this notion of working with your neighbors, working with your community. However, if you look at, for example, FEMA, they don't provide any instruction about how to engage people in this conversation. And so if you're saying, well, I should speak to my neighbors about this. Well, how do I start that conversation?

in a world right now in the social environment where if your neighbor comes to speak to you out of the blue, it's kind of weird, right? Many people don't talk to their neighbors anymore. And in New York City, especially when you're living in apartment, predominantly apartment types of situations, interacting with neighbors is becoming increasingly rare. And so the importance of social capital, not only here, but worldwide has become immensely more important.

than I think we've ever realized, but I also think there's been an acknowledgement that some scholars would say is not confined to cultural attributes or cultural subpopulations. I do believe, or I would argue, that the importance of social capital is inherently tied to cultural value systems within various ethnic groups or subpopulations.

Mitch Stripling (: 11:58

So that's part of what we write about. Let me put this question to you, Jordan. I'm going to put it, you know, I'm going to focus it right in. Right. So part of what Jason said was emergency management agencies don't don't want to get into this stuff. Right. Because it's anti -efficient. You know, we've talked about the drop off in response, how important the cultural attitudes are here. Why is this? What is it about our disaster imaginary that

that is maybe driving this, or do you think it is?

Jordan Pascoe (: 12:28

Yeah, I mean, I do think it is. I mean, I think that, you know, Jason, to your point, right, part of the reason why talking to our neighbors seems strange, even in disasters, is that we have this sort of very sort of individualist conception, right, of the self and of privacy. And a lot of the ways that people talked about lockdowns as infringing on liberty are really kind of like reflected or activated that sort of baseline set of assumptions, right. But one of the things that I think that's really interesting connected to that

to go back to what you're saying is I think you're right that in many ways COVID -19 is really important as a disaster in which the social capital framework does a tremendous amount of work, right? Social capital oriented ways of mapping and predicting the spread of contagion, right? Predicting resilience and vulnerability were really, really effective. In many ways, social capital predictions, social capital based predictions were more effective than other.

kinds of predictions in the pandemic, but they still missed a lot, right? One thing that they missed, for example, were caregiving relationships. Because of the way that we track social capital, we don't track informal relationships, right? Like, you know, day caregivers moving from one part of the city to another. And that means a second thing. Often when we're talking about social capital,

we're talking about trusting relationships, right? You sort of opened with trust. We're talking about relationships that benefit people, that give them more social capital. We tend to assume that relationships are gonna produce greater connectivity, greater social capital, and therefore aid in things like resilience. And what this misses is the way in which many of us are embedded in relationships that are parasitic. And caregiving relationships are a really good example of this.

And so one of the worries that we have is that we don't have good mechanisms for tracking this. And this is something that I think an equity framework can sometimes miss. If what we're doing is using equity or disparity as our measure, right? And so we sort of say, well, this neighborhood, right? There's this famous...

study of New York City that we looked at where they sort of come out and say, well, higher income neighborhoods are more likely to be able to shelter in place. They're more likely, therefore, to be resilient and cut down levels of contagion. Lower income neighborhoods, they're more likely to travel and therefore less likely to avoid contagion. And their assumption was that was because higher income neighborhoods have more amenities than lower income neighborhoods. But this misses the causal parasitic relation.

which is that people in lower income neighborhoods are traveling to higher income neighborhoods in order to provide services. It's on their backs that people in higher income neighborhoods are resilient, right? And so I think there are some significant gaps in thinking about these kinds of power relationships. And so for us, these two things are deeply intertwined. The fact that we're not taking caregiving relationships as paradigmatic relationships that should be orienting our analysis.

of how people are connected means that we miss these kinds of parasitic relationships and we end up with equity and disparity frameworks that miss the causal relationships and sort of like the root causes that produce simultaneously greater resilience in some neighborhoods and greater vulnerability in others.

Mitch Stripling (: 15:50

Sarah, you write about this when you're talking about the sort of moral injury in COVID -19 and other things where like we as humans, we want to care and it's like there's this thing stopping us, right? So in COVID -19, what is your diagnosis of what is preventing us from caring in the way our interdependence would seem to require in these moments?

Sarah Clark Miller (: 16:13

Yeah, so think the so initially when I wrote about that, I was thinking about health care workers, right, who were just absolutely squashed by the pandemic in all the ways. And this concept of moral injury comes up in in actually comes up in literature about combat and also in literature about health care. What I was trying to point out, which I think becomes more broadly relevant, is that part of the moral injury results because these are human beings in professions that

have kind of care as a base of value, even if they're not articulating it quite as such. And they were pretty consistently, I'll start with healthcare workers, but then think about teachers, right? Because this is another really underappreciated example. The healthcare workers, they became healthcare workers because they wanted to help people, and yet they were placed in circumstances where there was absolutely no way they could uphold their own moral codes or professional codes in trying to care for others because of the circumstances.

This happened to teachers as well, right? And I was, so I remember this is one moment when an ethicist was actually useful in the real world. Like there was this huge discussion going on with our school board about whether teachers should be required to report back to the classroom. And I knew a bunch of these teachers, some of whom had pretty serious, complicated health conditions, which meant that exposure would have been very dangerous. And so, you know, the one moment in the school board meeting where I was like the

And I jumped in and pointed out that there were these different values that were being embraced, right? And that all the different values needed to be heard and that an ethicist's job wasn't to tell them what to think, but rather to help them map those values. But at the basis of all of it, we had professionals who deeply wanted to be able to care for the kids in the classroom. And that was what was kind of not being acknowledged, right? So that's what was leading. Leading,

this whole conversation. So yeah, so there are lots of frontline people who got smushed in different ways, healthcare workers, teachers. And as Jordan was saying, mean, tons of dependency labor performers, dependency labor being this concept of basically caregiving professionally, who really were placed in danger. And the danger...

sorted out, not at all in ways that were unexpected along racial and socioeconomic lines, right? So that gives you, I think, some sense, Mitch, of a response to your question.

Mitch Stripling (: 18:39

Is the squishing inevitable? You know, real question for, you know, in an emergency like this, one claim that many people have made is COVID was, we could not have anticipated it, right? It came out of nowhere. I, but the, but,

Sarah Clark Miller (: 18:55

Of course we could have anticipated it. Sorry, you got the hand gesture. This will start now, right?

Jason Rivera (: 19:01

Ready to drink.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 19:02

So let me point to something that's happening right now, which is, another reason why I'm super fun at cocktail parties. I'm like, let's talk about H5N1. And everyone's like, drink, we're out of here. So H5N1, we are watching slow motion catastrophe. If we hit a point where H5N1 starts water spread patterns of human to human transmission, if anyone says,

Who could have known? You have to be kidding me. I know, Mitch, this isn't your position. But of course we knew. There had been lots of people thinking about what would happen in the next pandemic. And granted, there hadn't been a super big one of this nature. There had been other types of pandemics that had taken place. But we did know. So I don't think it has to be inevitable. But I do think the scale of change that

Jason Rivera (: 19:27

Thank

Sarah Clark Miller (: 19:51

would be required to make sure that this kind of squishing, which is very much a technical term that I'm hanging on to since I introduced it, I think the scale of change that would be necessary to make sure that squishing doesn't happen such that resilience is actually something that's available to all populations is massive. So I like to think it's within grass, but yes, it takes structural change. It would take structural change for that to be able to happen.

Jordan Pascoe (: 20:19

let me just jump in on that really fast. And then I want to hear from Jason, just to say that, you know, pandemics aside, right, this, we said, talked about this a little bit in a prior episode, but like, if you'd asked some feminists in to talk about what might happen in a pandemic when you were doing pandemic planning, I'm pretty sure that the crisis of caregiving might have been on the table in that.

process, right? So there are these questions of you know, there are these questions of epistemic injustice that are going on here. This question of like, who's in the room when we decide what the problem of pandemic is? Whose voices are relevant? Whose stories are relevant? What, whose concepts are we importing? And part of what we're naming here is that we did not use caregiving and caregiving relationships as paradigmatic relationships to think about this. Now,

Part of the reason that's a problem is that caregiving relationships, even in normal times, involve a certain amount of squishing. We assume that people who provide caregiving are just going to be able to keep providing caregiving long past the point where they're able to provide for themselves, right? Giving care makes people vulnerable and providing for other people's needs can exacerbate our own needs in a variety of ways.

And so when you surge that, like you do in a pandemic, this is what's gonna happen. So I think this is another place where, like, just to amplify what Sarah's saying, if we had been using caregiving frameworks to think about, what a pandemic is, or frankly, what a disaster is, then I think, one, we would have seen the squishing problem much more clearly ahead of time, and two, we would have better conceptualized what a pandemic was.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 22:04

Yeah, and I'll say, I want Jason to jump in too, but I'll just note this is one of the many reasons why I think the book that the two of you have written is so brilliant, right? Because you are thinking about, I you're really addressing this type of epistemic injustice, which helps us think about who might need to be around the table now, right? With knowledge that might not have been drawn on before.

Mitch Stripling (: 22:20

I just said.

That's what we really like is flagrant praise. So thanks, Sarah, for that, for just drawing that out. That's definitely what we're here for. No, please, please keep, but Jason, in there. I mean, what do you think?

Jordan Pascoe (: 22:25

you

Sarah Clark Miller (: 22:26

I speak the truth.

Jordan Pascoe (: 22:31

Thank

Jason Rivera (: 22:35

So I have a lot of tangents going on in my head now, but no, you're absolutely right. Like, is this something that we saw that was an unforeseen thing? No, absolutely not, right? We had been preparing for pandemics. I mean, maybe not to this exact scale, but I mean, the notion of a potential health threat to affect various populations, if not entire nations, I mean, it was there. It was there in the planning.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 22:35

Jason.

Jason Rivera (: 23:02

We had the notion for it. Federally, we underfunded it or defunded preparedness for it for various reasons. But then there's this notion of exceptionalism, right, that we have not only in the United States but in other places as well. How will this ever happen? This can't happen to us. Yeah, this is something that happened 100 years ago, but we didn't have the technology. We didn't have the XYZ that we have now. And so the notion of

prioritizing this as something that could eventually affect us, I believe, not only affected broader society, but also the people that were there or should have been there to really respond to this immediately, right? The notion of, and again, I go always back to the mixed messaging, is this notion of, okay, this is a pandemic and we are being alerted that this is a severe health threat.

as I believe Americans and even personnel, when you hear that, you don't necessarily cognitively go to this thing that we kind of only see in movies, right? And so this notion of this is now the reality and the exceptionalism we have in this country and then other places around what can happen, what cannot happen has deprioritized this in not only agencies, but also in the will of the public, right? So when the politicians come out and say, well,

You know, we need to put money into either pandemic preparation or even natural hazard preparation and mitigation efforts. Well, that cannot happen to us. That's something that happens in the middle of nowhere that nobody ever hears about. And eventually it'll be on the news. But when we bring those people to the table that typically are what we say, quote unquote, or the BRIC legislation says is the most vulnerable populations, for example,

These are people that are dealing with natural hazards, we'll go to it in a more general sense, on a daily, if not annual basis, in the absence of intervention, right? And so they're like, no, this is happening. Despite this being predominantly anecdotal, and again, this goes to what you talk about in chapter three, but then also more broadly, this notion of, what is actual truth versus what is accepted as truth and what is actually valued, right?

what we have are these populations who have these truths, have these life experiences into generational life experiences that are completely ignored due to these worldviews of truth that are based on these notions of verifiable statistics or quantitative data. And so what I, again, not,

you'll get enough flattery over the course of this podcast. But no, one of the things about what you're doing is that everything throughout this book goes back to who is at the seat at the table, as you said, and I've been talking about this for much longer than people have wanted to say as far as how do you bring people to the table of community development, which is tied to actual mitigation and preparedness practices. But then,

When we talk about these things, think this actually...

inflates the actual presence or the actual occurrence of burnout in these situations. Because the expectation that people have is that this will be very quick, it'll go away, and then we won't have to deal with it anymore. But when it becomes a prolonged issue, this is not the reality that we've been exposed to or socialized to expect.

Jordan Pascoe (: 26:25

think Jason, to your point, like a really important part of that is just like, who's the we there, right? Who's the we or the us that has this exceptional perspective that then informs our sense of what is a disaster and what's not? You know, every time I give a talk on this subject, the first question the philosophers want to ask is they're like, but what is a disaster? Right. And I'm like, okay. And so time, every time, right.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 26:45

In exactly that tone, is it

Jason Rivera (: 26:47

Yes, yes.

Jordan Pascoe (: 26:49

And we have multiple answers to that question in the book, but one of them is something is a disaster because we practice it as a disaster. And part of how we decide what to practice as a disaster is determined by this question of who's at the table. And that question of who's at the table is not just a question of who's at the table, who's in the room. It's a question of which voices are understood to be giving evidence and which other voices are understood just to be saying stuff.

Right? To your point about kind of like what kind of evidence are we looking at, right? Our assessments of credibility play into that. As well as who's in a position to frame the concepts that we're going to use to do this analysis and whose experience does not fit neatly within those concepts and therefore their experience becomes impossible to communicate.

right? Or in extreme cases becomes heretical, becomes nonsense within the sense of this. And one of the reasons why we start with caregiving in this example is that we were so struck by the fact that in US pandemic planning, caregiving was sort of like a heretical concept. Like, why would we be talking about parents, right? Well, you want to close schools. And if you close schools, it seems reasonably clear.

that children are gonna be running behind people in Zoom on BBC, right? Like happened, but no one saw that coming because that concept of caregiving and the forms of dependency that are in there were not relevant concepts, right? And so it's this weird thing, like, obviously people who wrote pandemic plans, many of them have caregiving responsibilities. It's not like this isn't part of their experience, part of their life.

But it doesn't show up as evidence. It doesn't show up as conceptual resources. And so this is part of, think, the question is not just sort of who's in the room, but how does that shape what we take to be relevant, what we take to be important, what we take to be evidence, and what we take, therefore, to be the problem we are trying to solve.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 28:54

I mean, I'll say one thing that I think is helpful at this moment. I mean, part of what's going on in the background for all of this is that the, let me make a very bold claim, right? mean, basically, caregiving needs to remain invisible as a form of dependency labor, right? Because if it's seen actually as labor, it's essentially that upon which much of a neoliberal kind of structure can function. And so,

it suddenly became in the context of the COVID -19 pandemic, very much not invisible, right? And the question is, do we maintain it in this type of position where we need to see the labor that is performed, which probably should be valued greater than it is, right? So part of who gets to be at the table and the value of what they're saying, if you're going to value those who are pointing out that caregiving matters and that it's dependency labor,

and that those who are performing it should be valued better than they currently are in society, that is going to have to make lots of other things shift. I said that was one quick thing and it wasn't, but I think it's a hopefully important one to point out now.

Jordan Pascoe (: 30:03

Well, I think it is there and it also points to the ways in which, you know, that invisibility of caregiving, right? Like this is related to some of what Mitch and I talk about, we should all drink now about epistemological systems, right? Which is, I know, right? Where part of it is when we can't see something as a system.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 30:15

Trick!

Mitch Stripling (: 30:17

you

Thank you.

Jordan Pascoe (: 30:21

In other words, we just think that the distribution of caregiving is like the way things are, right? That it has to remain invisible because it has to just kind of be the natural order of things, right? And there's a whole bunch of, you know, of patriarchal, racist, capitalist bullshit holding all of that up, right? And one of the things that COVID -19 did was it revealed that organization as a system.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 30:26

natural.

Absolutely.

Jordan Pascoe (: 30:46

And one of the ways that it did that for many of us was it suspended parts of that system so that pieces of it that we weren't even aware that we were relying on were suddenly apparent, right? And again, this moment of like, I'm sure lots of people remember this, like the guy giving the talk on the BBC and his toddler like runs in the background and his wife was like ninja crawling behind him to get it, right? And which is such a good example of moments where, I think,

And not that this is a purely gendered thing, but I think there is a general sense in which a lot of men don't have an awareness of the many pieces of the system that they are relying on in order to be able to go out in the world and, you know, function as workers and citizens every single day. And by suspending some of that, the pandemic made that visible as a system and not just as a natural order of things.

And when that happens, when we can see something as a system, then we can start to say, well, is this a good system or could it be otherwise? But we can't ask that question as long as we just assume that it's simply the way things are.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 31:52

Mm -hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Mitch Stripling (: 31:53

No,

a while ago, Sarah, you said the word resilience, and I kind of let it flow by. You know, I was like, there it is. Maybe that should really be our drinking word. But now let's, we got to wrestle it because, you know, what I heard you say is that, you know, the system that we have doesn't let some people who are suffering in it be resilient, right? And yet, you know, as Jordan's describing, that system itself is

is resilience. hard to change. You know, I've been working in emergency management for 20 years. I've seen legislation come and go that's tried to make emergency response more equitable and more infusing social capital and it keeps failing. So it seems like a bad plan to have a system of response that increases vulnerability and precarity of some people. Like, why would you ever respond to something bad?

in a way that actually seems to make things worse for delivery workers, for people that we're calling essential workers, that's forgetting these areas. Why would you create a resilient system that doesn't let the people within it be resilient? So somebody fix that for me. do you think, Jason, what do you think about that? Yeah, I could see.

Jason Rivera (: 33:02

you

Well,

based on your explanation, it's inherently not resilient, right? And so, like, that's part of the problem. And so, I've been... Well, I tried to explain to some of my FEMA colleagues and some of the people is when we're talking about resiliency, you cannot be resilient or any geographic region cannot be resilient unless everybody's at the table, right? Because you inherently leave people out. What is prioritized as systematic or systemic

things that should be given attention to, they are not necessarily the things that should be given attention to by all the people that should be at the table. And so when we talk about resiliency, and one of the things I loved about this was the notion of, okay, well, we're resilient in what way and recovering from what, right? And to what extent, in what way are we moving forward? So if we're talking about resiliency, okay, we'll just bounce back or somehow absorb the shock of an event.

Have we done that? And to Jordan's previous point around like, well, okay, we've been able to identify these problematic systems. Have we changed in any way as a byproduct of actually visualizing them? I think like any other disaster, we say, this is a shitty type of thing that we're seeing and this is horrible. And we harp on it, but then for some one reason or another, it fades away into the background.

and then give or take 25, 100 years, we go, you know what? Same thing that happened before and the same crappy systems that we had are back. Why? Because when we had the opportunity to recover or be resilient in different ways, we said, you know what? That's too hard. Or there's path -dependent issues that create a situation where we just don't have the capacity to change or won't change, right? And so, I'm sorry.

But like, so when we, I get aggravated when I talk to some of my colleagues and say, okay, well, we're resilient or this population is not resilient, for example. Well, how are you defining resilient? It may not be resilient in the way that the feds define it or the way the state defines it in some type of way, but these communities, these populations are resilient. And in many cases, in the absence of intervention, they are able to withstand

time and events and we look at them from the traditional worldviews, right, as they're backwards. Well, why is that? Why are we doing that? We can learn from these communities. We can learn from those populations. But again, as Jordan and Sarah has already pointed out, it's like we devalue these ways of coping, right?

these different notions of either caregiving at a very intimate level or even the societal level. Sorry, you set me off.

Jordan Pascoe (: 35:53

Hahaha

Mitch Stripling (: 35:53

No.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 35:54

Jason,

I'd already been set off with a hand gesture, so I just feel like you're joining me. I feel very supported in my response of like, well, of course it's a problem. So yes, we're good.

Mitch Stripling (: 36:06

So why? That's what I want to know. Why are we stuck in this cycle? What is the rock that won't move when we hit these places?

Jordan Pascoe (: 36:16

I mean, is where one of my favorite moments in this project was actually the resilience question, because this was the place where the literature on social epistemology and the literature on disaster started to talk to each other to use the same concept in similar kinds of ways in ways that are actually really informative for both. So Jason's totally right. Resilience is often defined from dominant perspectives.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 36:17

Go Jordan, please.

Jordan Pascoe (: 36:43

most likely to be recognized when it is privileged populations bouncing back to the ways they were before. And this prevents us from seeing other forms of adaptation and survival as modes of flourishing. Absolutely. I mean, I think a generally good feminist question is like, you know, what does resilience look like in caregiving contexts? I think that might give us a different starting point to think about what resilience is.

But one thing that I really got from the social epistemology literature, and I'm drawing especially here on Christy Dotson's conception of resilience and epistemology, is that it really matters what kind of system it is that's resilient. If we have a system which is designed to be unequal, is designed to be parasitic, and is designed to benefit some at the expense of others, and then we surge that system in a disaster,

we're gonna end up harming people and we're gonna end up harming people along incredibly predictable lines, right? As both Sarah and Jason have pointed out. And so, you know, one of the ways that we think about this in the book is that our disaster imaginaries, our disaster ways of knowing are tools of resilience for a lot of our hierarchical and harmful systems.

they ensure that in these moments where we can suddenly see, for example, that caregiving is a system and not just the way things are, that rather than having a moment of being like, my God, maybe we need to produce this kind of huge structural change that Sarah's talking about, like radically rethink how we organize and distribute caregiving, instead, right, we're oriented through kind of like disaster individualism.

And so we root away from that and that ensures the resilience of our ways of knowing care that prevent us from taking action on what we saw. And so Jason, I think this can help explain some of your point, which is that, yes, we saw this in COVID, but one of the ways we are resilient is that we are epistemically resilient. We were able to see it and then bounce back. We were able to see it and not really do a whole lot to change a lot of these features in part because these are not

disaster phenomena, they are part of our normal that become visible, right, in these moments of disaster, right? But the system you're describing, Mitch, is just how we built the world. Do know what I mean? Like, I don't know that it's specific to disaster. It's how we built the world in general that becomes readily apparent in disaster.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 39:09

them.

What I'm thinking of are like: 1980

Jason Rivera (: 39:28

Thank

Sarah Clark Miller (: 39:44

And there are certain populations whose nylon is not so out of shape because it hasn't been as tried. Whereas there are other populations who are constantly asked to bounce back in different ways. And after a while, they can't, right? So if we're gonna, so I have a particular resistance to the word resilience. And I know that both of you are, probably all of everyone in this room is suspicious of the term in different ways. But I think that if we're going to continue to use it, we need to,

create a condition where we basically need a new concept of resilience, right? Where it doesn't emerge from neoliberalism, where it doesn't shift the responsibility for survival and flourishing, if that's possible, onto individual people. And where we don't talk about resilience absent, we basically need power analysis, right? For any time we're going to request that a population be resilient. So yeah, I mean, that's the type of kind of...

Futurity that would be great, but new resilience as it's used now is Often at least within ethical literature, right thought to be something that is Praiseworthy when you're able to attain it, but you're not all starting from the same level, right? So if you're already privileged being resilient is gonna be a heck of I'm not saying being resilient was easy for anybody during lockdown, I mean it was just hard but it was

easier for some of us, right, who had certain resources and hadn't been asked to stretch so much prior to those experiences.

Jordan Pascoe (: 41:09

Sarah, this is something I'm thinking a lot about in my current work. And Jason, I suspect you'll be able to help me with this. One of the questions I have is sort of like, you know, because I think there's a lot of redefining resilience in the wake of COVID. Like there's a lot of like, no, no, by resilience, we mean adaptation. By resilience, we mean, and so, and I think you're absolutely right that if we're going to transform the meaning of a term, we need some other places to go to look.

One of my favorite definitions of resilience that I'm sort of open to considering is the way that like Adrienne Marie Brown talks about it, an emergent strategy, right? Where she's really thinking about the resilience of ecosystems as an adaptive resilience. And I think we're seeing some of that seeping into the ways that we see resilience being deployed in some of the new frameworks that are emerging. My question is, and I have this question about a lot of projects of conceptual re -engineering like this, is,

Is it useful to use the same term? Is it useful to now have a new resilience, which is actually just adaptive resilience, which is a totally different thing? Or is it helpful for clarity purposes to maybe have a new term? Like in other words, is it important that resilience be the concept that we're gonna reshape and mold that's gonna travel with us through this learning process? Or is it maybe useful to be like, okay, resilience was this way of practicing

disasters and recovery and so on and so forth. And we had some problems with it. And so now we have a new concept, right? So I'm really interested in kind of like the ethical question of when we should like ameliorate or improve a concept and when we should like leave it behind intentionally in order to re -engineer something new.

Mitch Stripling (: 42:44

Let me just say before Jason answers, you go on a podcast with a philosopher and this is the question you get. Right there. Conceptual re -engineering through vocabulary. What do think, Jason?

Jordan Pascoe (: 42:51

No, so sorry.

Jason Rivera (: 42:56

So, okay, so this is something that I get to in a number of different things I look at, right? So academics are known for creating new concepts, new words, to describe essentially the same thing over and over again, right? Just new boxes. One of the problems I think you allude to is that we just have such a varied notion of what resiliency is.

We don't really know, you go into a room of emergency managers or even public administrator, it doesn't matter. You say resiliency and they're all looking around like, well, what do you mean by that? Because it means you pick a definition by the agency and it means different things to different people. And so one, think there needs to be a coherent or at least a more standardized notion of what we're talking about when we're using the term first.

Then when we talk about resiliency, again, I think there's different indicators, different ways we can define or operationalize what it is. But again, I don't necessarily think that helps us become more resilient because again, if it's based off of no matter how you define it, some broad notion of bouncing back, shifting to a new system inherently

breaks that mold, right? You're no longer resilient, you're basically breaking the structure to move on to something else. So can we use the word resiliency to describe that function? I don't think you can. I think what you're saying is you're recovering in a different way or in a critical way to make things better. And then we can create a new system that is more resilient in which can be characterized or operationalized in these ways.

But to be resilient in what we have based on what has already pointed out our broken systems that inherently perpetuate power structures, it's going to reiterate the same thing over and over again. Because if you say, we're resilient, well, then it is literally going back to what we are before, or it is at least going back to something similar. And breaking that breaks the narrative that the

that the politicians and the power structure has around the functionality of our systems as a whole. When we start to challenge that, well, you can't just say, it's just caregiving is we have to fix, right? You have to fix, start fixing everything. And then it becomes something that the politicians, no, no, no, no, no, you can't do that. And so, and again, you see this in other types of policy domains, like this notion of,

of critical race theory in the conversations around social equity around the country. It's like, can we talk about this? No, don't talk about that because then we have to start analyzing or assessing how the system actually affects different populations in various ways. And it gets too complicated if we're going to help different people in different ways and have different. And so to your question, I love the idea of do we create a new term?

Do we reconceptualize this in a different way? I think if we refine what we're talking about, so we're not speaking past each other or having to define the concept every time we start a conversation with a new group of people, I think that's at least the first step.

Jordan Pascoe (: 46:08

And, and Jason, I think one thing that's really useful about that, piece about talking past each other, right? The, the philosopher, Sally Haslanger distinguishes between sort of like our official definitions of terms and then our operative definition or the way that they get used by normal people, right? Like kind of on the ground. And I think that's part of like, part of the problem that you're naming, which is that we can keep redefining what resilience is in official guidance and official documents in a whole bunch of ways. But if the way that it is.

hashed out in practice on the ground by non -experts is still this old school, let's just bounce back, right? This is what resilience looks like. Then there's a sense in which those new definitions are doing the same kind of harm, right? But without the accountability of being like, that's what we in fact intended to do, right? And so these things come apart.

Jason Rivera (: 46:57

And we compound the problem by using additional abstract terms. So we'll talk about the equity of resiliency. again, another term that people have various definitions for and can take one.

Mitch Stripling (: 47:11

but you, Jason, you defined social equity, right? And this is, I want to be clear about this in terms of cashing stuff out. You are the only person I know who's proposed a pretty specific framework for what social equity means in emergency management based on a review of the literature. And so I want to ask you, because to me, this is a powerful idea. It is useful and it is in some sense measurable.

Jason Rivera (: 47:15

I knew that was coming.

Mitch Stripling (: 47:37

Walk us through for a minute what you think social equity is and in particular what it means about the status quo. Because you make the point partly that the politicians, responders don't want to mess with the status quo. So what is social equity and does it have to mess with the status quo if you use it as a goal?

Jason Rivera (: 47:58

So social equity is attempting, and this is applicable to emergency management, but arguably Claire Connelly Knox and I say that you can apply this notion to all public service provision areas. And the idea is to provide equal, inclusive, effective services to all populations and not to just go down a checklist of identifications.

And so one of the problems that I, that me and a number of other people started to run into was when we're talking about social equity, is an immediate.

There's an immediate, people believe you're alluding to race, gender, et cetera. However, it's not just issues of race, ethnicity, and gender. It's an issue of social class, social economics, religion, and the list goes on and on. And so to create of, well, what has traditionally been done is addressing particular issues for particular populations that is

also not socially equitable. based on the literature, we try to break down what, within emergency management, and then also public administration has identified as dimensions of what social equity are. What are the important dynamics of social equity? Which, again, some of which have not been individually explored in various ways. So one of the dimensions that we talk about is

For example, access. Well, what does access mean? In the vernacular, as you point out, in the American context, we talk about access in relation to, for example, you had mentioned roles earlier, procedural fairness, is another type of, which is another one of our dimensions, but this notion of opportunity of access, ADA types of notions of accessibility. But there are other...

it ends up being more complicated as far as economic dynamics, proximity, cultural accessibility and appropriateness. Things that we don't necessarily think of when we think of access that either provide an administrative burden on people to access something or in the other direction, provides an administrative burden on the organizations attempting to provide the service to begin with.

And so we create this definition, which people have said is quite, well, I'll use the word ambitious to be nice, right? But we deliberately put it out there, particularly to get kicked in the face or get kicked in the teeth. We saw for the last 50 years in public administration, a discipline who is founded in the 70s off of this notion of social equity.

And for 50 years, no one has come out with a definition on what's equitable. And so when we have these conversations, we have this notion of what it may mean or what it means to you. And so when we talk to emergency managers or even service providers in any sense, we can talk about what are the potential characteristics of social equity. You want to provide

access. You want to provide equal outcomes to the interventions that you provide. You want to save people. don't want to necessarily you want to provide services in such a way that do not discriminate people as best you can in a deliberate way. But if you use the word social equity when trying to engage in conversation, people just shut down because they have these perceptions of what it means based on either their own socialization processes or what we are now seeing over the last

eight years around, well, social equity really is just for a particular population. And it's sad because what I've been trying to do in social equity is no, social equity is for everyone. The media and our national history talk about the importance of social equity and the importance to particular racial and ethnic groups and gender groups. But again,

are just as in need of socially equitable practices as everyone else.

Mitch Stripling (: 52:09

Well, let me,

no, I want to just, cause to me you're actually not highlighting what I feel like is the most radical or maybe the most likely to get kicked in the face part of the definition you propose, right? Because you say, you know, first it's, you know, the active culturally competent provision of services to every social group across all phases. And that's what you're talking to. But you also say that part of a push for social equity,

must be the continuing reduction of all groups social vulnerability over time. And I think that's the part that's not the status quo part. I think that's the part that is somewhat dangerous to current emergency management thinking.

Jason Rivera (: 52:47

So the last dimension we talk about is outcomes. And that's really what gets to how do you get interventions to have an equal impact or essentially an equal result, regardless of the population you're dealing with. And that inherently is tied to breaking down the structures in which we live. Again, we're providing this definition as a means to say what would be the ideal situation.

So we create this kind of, or we propose rather, this measurement of social equity and how you could potentially measure or say something is equitable or moving towards equitable practice. What Claire and I would argue is potentially there is no way to actually get to an inherently totally socially equitable situation based on the power structure or the systemic issues that we're dealing with now.

We inherently have to break with that. So I hear myself and I've heard myself before say this, this may be a pie in the sky type of endeavor in that we're talking about social equity, can we get there? I think we can try to get there, but it also means to actually get there means breaking from the systems in which we are inherently part of and also acknowledging that that's other types of.

world views. So I would say this also, which is kind of revising not necessarily this definition, but since writing this, we've also come to, again, integrating this notion of epistemological types of worldviews, right? Well, is our notion of social equity actually equitable across contexts, right? Because again, the literature we're pulling from

is inherently westernized colonizer type of literature and journal bases, right? And so is that the actual idea of what's equitable? And so yes, to answer your question, it entails, it inherently entails breaking systems. So who then has the actual to do that?

I guess is what the question that I have. Who will actually break with what is practice, what is considered the appropriate way of doing things and go on a limb and start to push an agenda that will actually make systemic changes in the right way? And again, I'm using value laid in terms, right? What is the right way? Again, is a contextualized type of notion.

Jordan Pascoe (: 55:25

I think, Jason, that's really important, right? This is something that we really tried to center in our work is this idea that we can have a sense of what the right way is with the recognition that that's with sort of the credibility economy and the conceptual resources and within the system we have now. And as we get better at, you know, centering more voices and being open to more perspectives, our conception of what's right and what's good may shift accordingly, right? But

I also just want to say to that question of like, how is this change going to happen? That this is part of what Mitch and I think is powerful about thinking about these questions in disaster. And I think your work really, really bears this out, which is that it's very difficult to get radical systemic change just like on a Tuesday, like people aren't up for it. You know what I mean? Like what agency is going to be like, you know what, let's radically rethink how we organize access to healthcare. But in a disaster, there are moments where you have

Jason Rivera (: 56:11

Okay.

Jordan Pascoe (: 56:20

both the need to very, very rapidly invent new systems and infrastructure, and you have people having these collective moments of awareness and lucidity as they're in these new relationships with one another, as they're casting about for conceptual resources to understand this world that's ruptured. And so I think that thinking about this social equity question, which you're right, is a much bigger question than disaster. Thinking about it in disaster is really important. But, and I have this question for Sarah.

One of the ways that disaster then roots us away from this kind of change is it keeps, think, I was thinking that your distinction between needs and injury is really useful here because it continues to sort of like the disaster context tends to root us towards thinking that equity should be, we need equity in order to deal with the injuries caused by the disaster.

which are different from broader questions of needs. They overlap, but they're different. And so I'm wondering how your thinking on injury and need could maybe help us to think about the limits of the disaster context here.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 57:28

I mean, I don't know if it points to the limits so much, but it might. Well, we'll see. mean, in essence, right? So to go philosophical for a moment with anything like needs or vulnerability or dependency, the philosophers are going to say that there's a way in which that is shared ontologically among all of us, right? So everyone listening to this is vulnerable in certain ways. Like you all could get sick from, you know, any kind of virus that exists, but the...

But then vulnerability politically gets distributed differently. And so there are two senses of vulnerability going on. Same with dependency and same with something like precarity. So this means that certain people's to go to the concept of need for a moment, certain people end up kind of reliably experiencing certain forms of need in a way that economic systems, political systems produce. And I think I was in listening to

Jason, I found myself wondering if part of the issue, says the philosopher who is not involved in any kind of actual useful trade, right? But I wonder if part of the issue, and this is really to draw on some material from some disability justice theorists like me and Mengus, for example, who pointed out, gosh, maybe a third of the way through lockdown that there perhaps was an investment in producing populations that would be vulnerable.

that would be sickly, right? That there are aspects of economic systems that need a certain part of the populace to be desperate in a kind of way, who will economically desperate, for example, such that they'll perform labor that other people don't want to. And so I think we have to look at ways in which systems might be designed to produce certain forms of vulnerability or certain forms of need in ways that support

other functioning for the privilege, right? So I say this cautiously because it's a big structural point. And yet it kind of, I think, is in the background, Jason, behind some of what you're thinking through. I hopefully...

Jason Rivera (: 59:26

Well,

I think you're absolutely right. The functionalism of what or of despair, of need, of disparity is inherently ingrained in the system, right? It's economically profitable. Let's go in that direction, right? For various populations to require or be dependent on the services that would be

subsequently provided by a pandemic or disaster, et cetera, right? And so there, I mean, I don't, I wouldn't say it's a conspiratorial type of situation, but it could be, it could be compared to almost like a racket type of situation to a certain extent. We've created a situation in which people, if the right events or the right,

Circumstances present themselves will be dependent on particular organizations, systems, et cetera. And that reinforces the need for the system. And then we can go back and say, you know what, guess what? When things went bad, we were there to help. We won't mention that the reason things were bad were because we created the situation in which they are bad, but you're absolutely right. I think, again, and you talk about this in the book,

This notion of how the system perpetuates itself predominantly because of the interconnectedness of how the system works. And it is ultimately very deliberate, right? None of this is actually by coincidence. But yeah, sorry.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:00:58

And what?

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:00:59

No, no, I

mean, I think that's exactly right. And I think that's an important piece of it. It's another place where, again, if we took caregiving as a paradigmatic example of this, right, many, many, for example, privileged, you know, middle to upper class people can afford childcare precisely because other people are so poor, they are willing to work.

right, informally for significantly less money. And that produces these care chains that we're talking about, right? But both of you are absolutely right that part of what this means is that the freedom to have children and also go to work every day is to some degree or another in our current system, premised upon this inequality that needs to be reproduced in various ways, but also rendered meritocratic.

right? Rendered, right? Like Kant would say rightful, right? So like rightful inequalities as if this was a thing that

makes any sort of sense at all, right? But Jason, to your point, like this is something we find in social ecological literature all the time. The more internally coherent and internally interdependent an ecosystem is, the more likely it is to be resilient. And so these sorts of parasitic relationships that we're pointing to, the forms of inequality that we in fact need in order to be able to have the lifestyles and level of comfort that the privileged are.

know, accustomed to is that kind of internal organization that produces this kind of resilience.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:02:24

And what pisses me off about it is the way that like emergency management is asked to be like the little bitch of this huge discriminatory system, because we are working in a disaster to reproduce it, right? Our job is to kind of like restart it when it gets knocked down, right? We're like the jumper cables for this discriminatory system to make sure it gets put back together again. And I wonder, Sarah, if I could ask you to engage in

the work of imagination around the politics of care, which I think is really compelling. You're clear that the politics of care is not a mainstream idea. It's not even a mainstream idea within bioethics, right? But if you could imagine a disaster instead being a moment where the politics of care could get uptake and could find energy, what would that look like? Can you imagine what that would be?

Sarah Clark Miller (: 1:03:16

I can, I'm still also thinking through the little bitch jumper cables just to know that you were just referring to. So, because I just kind of loved that moment, so I'm just gonna repeat it again. Because it was a hilarious kind of combination of thoughts. So yeah, and when the pandemic, the COVID -19 pandemic happened, suddenly care was this thing that was everywhere. There were like a bajillion care conferences, right? Which was...

as far as I was concerned, except they all happened here on screen. And there was so much talk about care and how politically systems might shift such that caregiving could be supported, such that care would be provided. And I think it's not that I think it all went away. So this is a slightly, I don't know, weary response, but to some extent, a lot of that imagining, which I can point to and describe, did wane.

And yet I still think there are ways in which the notion of care itself, not simply a kind of dependency, labor and caregiving, but caring in relation to others, right? Caring about their needs, caring about forms of vulnerability. It's risen in terms of the attention it gets. So here's an example, as everyone in this room knows when we were originally supposed to record this, we couldn't because hilariously I had COVID. I was like, could we make this up? cannot.

So that meant that I had to go through the CDC protocol. I was supposed to be teaching all of that stuff. And when I went back into the classroom, I was cleared to enter. My symptoms were waning. I was testing negative. I went and masked. And I think no one else was masked. I think my students at first were a little taken aback because masks are now oddly political. But I talked with them from the very start about, first of all, what my institution's policy was and how I was following it. But importantly,

this was a gesture designed to care for them and to emphasize that they should be caring for one another. And so now in that classroom, students are emailing me to say, I'm sick, or this is status of my symptoms, and I will come in masked. And in conversation in this ethics seminar, care keeps on coming up. And it's either that they know I work on it, and so they're going to mention it. But I don't think it's just that.

the kind of conversation going on among the undergraduates from all sorts of political persuasions, right? They are more ready to talk about care. So if we imagine these are our, I do not have structural kind of solutions to offer, but I do think a lot now and I'm starting to work on not just understanding care relations, but care politics and thinking about how we, how care is something like a civic virtue.

might help us move political relationality beyond forms of polarization that we're currently experiencing, such that we could then rebuild a republic where care is not gendered and placed in a corner, but is really woven into the fabric. So how does this happen? I mean, I'm an ethicist, right? So I think a lot about individual relations and community relations and ways in which we can have care as an ethos.

be something that doesn't have to be explicitly political, identify with a political position, but rather returns to this form of relating to others in ways that involve support for their needs, beyond a of general form of respect we might have in a democracy. Something a little bit closer than that. A form of relationality where we do, as a matter of ethos, seek those forms of connection that are meaningful and

and determine how we might better support one another. So it's a dream. I don't have a playbook, but I do think that politically, I think it's possible. I think it's starting to be possible, she says in an oddly optimistic moment.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:07:00

Well, and I want to say to the optimism, Sarah, I mean, this comes back to sort of Jason's point earlier about resilience, right? That like part of the problem is that the frame we're doing all this in is this let's be resilient, let's rebuild, right? Which sets us up to believe that regime change would be a bad thing. That structure, radical structural change would be a bad thing. And one thing I want to name in all this is that care is often marshaled.

it for those resilient kinds of ideas, right? We have this deeply ingrained in part because of the way that caregiving is often hierarchical, the way that it's often, you know, it's taken to be like a feminine virtue, right? And so we often think of caregiving as having a kind of, and it's deployed in American political rhetoric as something conservative, right?

Care is how we conserve the status quo. It's part of producing resilience, right? Even though caregivers themselves may have to sacrifice in order to do that. And so we, think one of the dangers here is that in this kind of surging of care in our national discourse through COVID -19 is that in some ways that idea of care gets uptake.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 1:08:04

Mm

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:08:11

in ways that align with this project of resilience that Jason is talking about, right? This like care to get back to where we want to go. And I think that what you're pointing to and something that's really important here is something that we see a lot in disability and healing justice frameworks, right? So they have like radical care, care in fact as a radical political activity that involves a radical rethinking of the structures through which we relate to one another and that really

in very significant ways, reorients us in our most basic relationships, but also in the broad structures in which we're embedded. this is like, if we're gonna think about kind of like a radical project of imagination, Mitch, which we absolutely should be doing, I think it may be useful to prize care and resilience apart. And in fact, imagine ways that care could be a site of regime change.

in which we are cared for through that regime change. Part of what's scary about regime change is doing something new is terrifying. Well, if the regime change is rooted and grounded in relations of care, then that regime change might in fact be, you know, not so scary. It might be more possible. And so I think the kinds of the relationship you're pointing to, Sarah, between the sort of like the on the ground, effective and ethical experience of being in care and like an end

recognizing those civic relations of care as a starting point for broader structural shifts that could allow us to refuse the resilience framework and begin to think about being in new ways could be a radical side of imagination.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:09:43

Yeah.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 1:09:50

Yeah, and I think I mean, I think it's a both and situation, right? So I often joke about ethics not being useful. And yet, you know, I'm an ethicist for a reason. I'm also a social political philosopher for a reason, too. But so it's not just that we need in this kind of pie in the sky way to restructure relations in my classroom, as I was talking about. But it's we need a both and do we need structural change? Absolutely. But right. If structural change is occurring, it's going to be something that feels more possible if you feel secure in relation with

a number of other people in your community. And I think I like the idea of pulling care and resilience apart. Sometimes I think about it this way. If there were broader practices of care available, then people would need to be far less resilient. Like this should kind of be the goal, right? Like let's try to create circumstances where resiliency isn't as needed. Now I know

Mitch Stripling (: 1:10:20

Hmm.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 1:10:40

I think all of us in this room have children. Now we know that like the coming world for our kids, we do need them to be resilient, but because climate change, violence, I can give you the full list, right? You can think of the list yourselves, but it would be so much better if we could create caring structures that then limited the extent to which our kids would be required to be resilient in the future.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:10:59

Yeah.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:11:02

Well, and if it was those caregiving structures that needed to be resilient rather than the sort of like you as an individual must be resilient, right? But relocating the resilient into those relations of care.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:11:03

What?

Jason Rivera (: 1:11:10

you

Mitch Stripling (: 1:11:15

I think what we're saying is resilience may sometimes be a virtue, but it's certainly not the only virtue. There are others, adaptability, love, care. And sometimes resilience can be a negative if something is resilience that is maladaptive, if a bad system or you're being resilient because you're stuck in a different way. So resilience in that sense is a little, I don't want to use the word moral around philosophers, amoral or...

outside of morality, it can be imbued with different values. And we're talking about in this pie -in -the -sky way, but I guess I want to close with maybe more practical hope, you know, to just ask you, what do you think, given this is the most useful idea we should bring to the next disaster that is certain to come our way, either in changing disaster policy, in changing how we relate to each other, you know, what is that one small step that might help us?

next time.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 1:12:10

Who takes this first? Jason, do you want to go or do I go?

Jason Rivera (: 1:12:14

Be my guest.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:12:15

We could flip a coin, you know?

Sarah Clark Miller (: 1:12:17

So I don't know if this is, I think this is a useful idea. don't, you know, there are a number that have emerged, I, so I want to refer to here to the work of Leah Lakshmi and Piyapsa Samarasena, right? Who's a disability justice theorist. And in their book that they wrote during the pandemic, The Future is Disabled, they feature a concept called Crip -Dool -ing that I think

is a very useful concept from a care perspective. So they want to make cryptulating happen on a very large scale. And essentially what it points to is the notion that within disability communities, there have been people who have been living with forms of serious chronic illness for a long time. They kind of know how to navigate certain systems. They know what it's like to live in a white ableist society, right?

they can in fact teach those who are experiencing extended disability through long COVID, for example, for the first time. They can help bring people into that experience in ways that really prioritize the specialized knowledge that exists within the disability community and can create connections of care based upon that expertise and knowledge. And so I do, I really like this idea of cryptoling and thinking about

about pulling from knowledge that has been underappreciated in various disability communities to help the growing number of people who are experiencing long COVID figure out how to navigate the world better.

Jason Rivera (: 1:13:50

So I would piggyback off of, to a certain extent, what Sarah's alluding to and kind of change, I guess, the focus from the United States context to something more globally, right? So one of the things that we're seeing in emergency management practices, but also in public administration practices more broadly, is the final acceptance that other worldviews, other truths, other approaches to doing things are

in some ways better than how we've been the westernized colonizer type of structure, right? And this infusion of traditional ecological knowledge into what people and how they deal with situations is becoming, I don't want to use the word popular because it's probably inappropriate to use because it kind of alludes to a more broad base, but in various places, for example, in Latin America, in

parts of Asia, you're seeing an appreciation emerge that is separated from the barbarian type of public administration worldview that this is the way you have to do things. And so we can try to break or we're starting to break or places are starting to break. In the United States, what I am finding more hopeful, I'll use that word hopeful as Mitch had pointed out, is the conversations that we're having.

Not necessarily in just rooms at a conference or in hallways.

At the Disaster Research Center conference that I met Mitch in person at, and even at the Natural Hazards Conference, not this past summer, but the summer before, there's an overarching theme of the notion and the value of breaking the notion of recovery and resilience to go back to something, right? Or bouncing back.

Instead of thinking about what we could do to change the system, think about what we should do to change the system. And I know public administrators, emergency managers are avoidant to dealing with what we should do because they're valued judgements, right? And once you start to go along the idea of what you should do, you can potentially break with the legitimization of the structures in which you work, the politicians that see you as a...

actors of them or citizens seeing you as actors of them. But in order to bring that change that we have been talking about this entire time into fruition, the hope I see is that this has actually become center stage. One of the things that I think has become more predominant is this notion of we know it's broken.

We know the system is perpetuating itself to the detriment of various groups. There is functionalism attached to it, but this is sick. We need to break with this. And I think what we are seeing is not only the academics and some practitioners deal with this, but at least in my experiences with working with FEMA and people within FEMA and some of the administrators,

is that there has been, or at least now, a more legitimate acceptance and acknowledgement that we need to change in more critical ways. Now, I say that that's hope, but then I'm also a pessimist for most of my life. Okay, well then I'll be quiet.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:17:15

Yeah.

Now this was a hope question. This was a hope question.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:17:28

Well, and let me say something that brings together a little bit of what Jason and Sarah are saying, because I think this is really important, right? So Jason, I think you're absolutely right that part of what we're seeing post -COVID is, and we've been seeing it for longer, but especially since COVID, this collective awareness that this system is broken. There is something wrong with it. There is something wrong with our collective ways of being. And therefore, there is a question not just of critique, but the work of bringing

a world otherwise into being, right? This is the hope question. And so, know, Sarah, to your point, one of the things that Mitch and I theorize in the book, and we'll talk about in a future episode, is the idea of disaster doulas. And I think one way of thinking about the way in which we're thinking about disaster doulas is this work of bringing this world otherwise into being, is something I've said several times on this episode, right? Which is the importance of taking caregiving relations as

paradigmatic in how we think about what work is, what vulnerability is, what resilience and vulnerability are, and that this may give us some different starting points for thinking about key concepts like equity and resilience, right, as we've talked about. And it might open us up to relational and networked analyses capable of recognizing parasitic relations and forms of dependency.

and the causes of that dependency that are producing this brokenness. But also taking caregiving as paradigmatic can be a starting point for thinking about this work of dueling, of using relations of radical care, of mutual support, and of the expertise very often of someone who has been through a hardship before.

doing the work of bringing new worlds and new possibilities into being. And so I think that there's a great deal that we can mine from the care tradition, both at the level of critique, as well as in this really concrete question of like, how do we do the work of this hopeful question of bringing another way into being?

Mitch Stripling (: 1:19:38

Right? Well, let's end there. Sarah Clark Miller, Jason Rivera. Thanks so much for a fascinating conversation. Let's go out and imagine how we can care for each other better.

Sarah Clark Miller (: 1:19:48

Thanks, thanks for having me.

Jason Rivera (: 1:19:50

Thank you.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:20:01

love how we close at the end of that conversation with this kind of call for hope and care. I think what's important is one of the things we found, actually my favorite chapter in the book is Jordan's chapter on backlash and disasters, which we haven't gotten to yet. But what we know is that feeling like you care for people in emergencies, just this feeling of caring is not enough. And so next time on the show, we get to talk about perspectives. We get to talk about standpoint.

and how your standpoint shapes those feelings of care and why you need to pay attention to people's locations in emergencies, people's status in class. Does that mean we get to talk more about epistemology? Yes, and that's why we're only going to allow ourselves light beer on the podcast and not whiskey because I think next episode on whiskey we would go down quickly. We may not even make it 15 or 20 minutes. It would be like doing shots at a bachelorette party. You know what? Challenge accepted.

Next time on Tough Shift.

Mitch Stripling (: 1:21:33

whatever you said. I've been recording this whole time. So I just want you to know that we captured it.

Jordan Pascoe (: 1:21:36

Great. Great.

Jason Rivera (: 1:21:37

Great