Kevin Grove

• PhD (Geography)
• Professor at Florida International University

Is resilience simply a fad, or is it a new way of thinking about human–environment relations, and the governance of these relations, that has real staying power? Is resilience a dangerous, depoliticizing concept that neuters incipient political activity, or the key to more empowering, emancipatory, and participatory forms of environmental managemen...

How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of ‘slow emergencies’. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing togethe...

This paper explores the relation between resilience, justice and recognition through a case study of resilience planning in the Greater Miami Region. Greater Miami resilience plans, prepared through the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities program, have foregrounded equity as a cross-cutting theme-a surprising move given the region's histo...

In this article, we seek to open up for critical debate disciplinary narratives that center the “synthesis” qualities of geographic thought. Proponents of Geography often emphasize its integrative, synthesis approach to human–environment relations to underline its value to interdisciplinary research initiatives addressing critical real-world issues...

The archipelago of Puerto Rico has faced multiple natural disasters, including hurricanes and earthquakes, disrupting the mental health and daily lives of its residents. These disasters, combined with socio-political abandonment, have led to the deterioration of the electrical grid, exacerbating health disparities. This study aimed to explore the l...

This innovative textbook on the theories, approaches and methodologies that inform political geography is brought together by past and present editors of the journal of the same name. The book fills the current gap in the literature through a reflection on the ‘doing’ of political geography: its very practice. The book includes chapters authored by...

This introductory chapter illustrates how the book serves as both a text on political geography and an example of practising it. By focusing on ‘practice’, it offers an alternative entry into the discipline, emphasizing the embodied, embedded, and place-based activities of political geographers. Traditional definitions of political geography often...

Puerto Rico (PR) is a United States (US) territory with a history of colonial violence, poverty, and government corruption. Due to these sociopolitical factors and natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes and earthquakes), there has been a sharp increase in PR residents migrating to the mainland US. Local media and professional health organizations focu...

Puerto Rico (PR) is facing an unprecedented healthcare crisis due to accelerating migration of physicians to the mainland United States (US), leaving residents with diminishing healthcare and excessively long provider wait times. While scholars and journalists have identified economic factors driving physician migration, our study analyzes the effe...

This paper problematizes how scholars understand the relation between resilience and justice. Critical and applied scholarship tends to dismiss resilience as a neoliberal barrier to justice, or assume it necessarily advances justice outcomes. Instead, drawing on collaborative fieldwork with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers, we expl...

Since 2000, an exodus of Puerto Ricans leaving the island has reduced the local population by almost 20 per cent. One of the migratory waves of greatest concern is that of physicians due to its potential impact on Puerto Rico’s (PR) public health. Strategies to curtail their migration have overlooked the island’s unique cultural and geographic stre...

Puerto Rico (PR) has a growing physician migration problem. As of 2009, the medical workforce was composed of 14,500 physicians and by 2020 the number had been reduced to 9,000. If this migration pattern continues, the Island will not be able to meet the recommended physicians per capita ratio proposed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Existi...

In this Urban Pulse essay, we explore post-COVID-19 pandemic experiments with integrating cryptocurrency into urban governance. Drawing on the case of the City of Miami, we draw attention to practices and imaginaries of crypto-urban statecraft. This concept signals the recalibration of urban governance using cryptographic technologies. In Miami, cr...

The concept of vulnerability has been central to geographic research on human–environment relations. Three shifts in the concept's evolution alongside shifting forms of reason that prevail within the wider discipline are particularly important. First, that from early hazards scholars' positivism and behavioralism to the structuralist and materialis...

Vieques is a small municipal island in the east of Puerto Rico (PR) that lost its hospital infrastructure during Hurricane Maria. Currently, residents with medical emergencies must travel to the PR mainland to receive specialized care. These are outcomes of a long history of colonial neglect that has resulted in a slow response attending to the hea...

The objective of the presentation was to ilustrate motives that fostered physician's permanecence in Puerto Rico.

In this article, we explore the use of the image as a strategy to understand how natural disasters and coloniality impact the health of marginalized communities. We focus on the aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico and aim to describe how local people used the image as a strategy to challenge the invisibility fostered by coloniality and advo...

In April of 2019, the Rockefeller Foundation’s “100 Resilient Cities” (100RC) program abruptly shuttered, surprising program proponents and critics alike. In this paper, we explore why this happened, why some styles of geographical critique could not anticipate 100RC’s closure, and what this inability means for dominant strands of critical geograph...

Background After its landfall in Puerto Rico in 2017, Hurricane Maria caused the longest blackout in United States history, producing cascading effects on a health care system that had already been weakened by decades of public sector austerity and neoliberal health reforms. This article addresses how health care professionals and administrators ex...

This paper draws upon the notion of slow emergency as a framework to interpret ethnographic and qualitative findings on the challenges faced by Puerto Ricans with chronic conditions and health-sector representatives throughout the island during and after Hurricane María. We conducted participant observation and qualitative interviews with chronic d...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic strains conventional temporal imaginaries through which emergencies are typically understood and governed. Rather than a transparent and linear temporality, a smooth transition across the series event/disruption–response–post-event recovery, the pandemic moves in fits and starts, blurring the boundary between normalcy...

In this article we critique resilience’s oft-celebrated overcoming of modern liberal frameworks. We bring work on resilience in geography and cognate fields into conversation with explorations of the ‘asymmetrical Anthropocene’, an emerging body of thought which emphasizes human-nonhuman relational asymmetry. Despite their resonances, there has bee...

In this response, I think through some implications of Chandler and Pugh’s typology of relational ontologies and onto-epistemologies for how we might engage the question of security in the Anthropocene. In doing so, I highlight how their poetic treatment of islands challenges relational thought on the Anthropocene to confront its own embodied and c...

This paper unpacks the emergence of pro-poor insurance-based climate change adaptation initiatives within development and disaster management agencies. It details how the equation between insurance and ethical climate change adaptation emerged through development economists' moral and technical critique of ex post disaster relief, which positioned...

Few concepts have proven to be as politically paradoxical for critical social scientists as resilience and the Anthropocene. For the former, resilience holds out the promise of novel ways of conceptualizing human-environment relations, and managing nature-society interactions, which are founded on a holistic and relational ontology of complexity, i...

This paper responds to the following paradox: as government actors have begun to operationalize resilience in a variety of ways and contexts, critical analyses of resilience have continued to sidestep empirical complexity in favor of "black boxing" the concept. This paper advances a different analytical path. Drawing on a case study of Greater Miam...

This intervention seeks to focus political geographic attention on design as a form of governing emergent futures in the urbanized world of the Anthropocene. Recent decades have seen design shifting its concern from objects to processes, systems and futures. Design orients thought and action not towards questions of how something came to be, but ra...

First paragraph: Recent electoral victories of right‐wing populist, ethno‐nationalist, and authoritarian candidates or platforms provide Anglophone commentators with evidence of fundamental challenges to liberal international order, norms of multi- cultural ‘tolerance,’ and neoliberal modes of regulation. The apparent demise of liberal order is not...

This paper develops a novel approach to what we call 'participation as assemblage' by drawing upon Félix Guattari's foundational work on assemblage theory. We develop and ground our concerns by taking the reader through the details of a participatory development case study that we have been involved in from the Caribbean since the 1990s. Through un...

This review article reads across David Chandler’s Resilience, Brad Evans and Julian Reid’s Resilient Life and Elizabeth Povinelli’s Economies of Abandonment to explore the possibilities for critical thought on security beyond resilience. Read together, these works suggest that resilience approaches offer a topological form of security that interior...

The Anthropocene marks a new geological epoch in which human activity (and specifically Western production and consumption practices) has become a geological force. It also profoundly destabilises the grounds of Western political philosophy. Visions of a dynamic earth system wholly indifferent to human survival liquefy modernity’s division between...

Using the case of Costa Rica, this paper examines how ′carbon′ became an identifiable problem for that state. We trace how, during the 1980s, rationalities of financialisation and security arose in this country that allowed for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) to emerge as an economic and political mechanism. Our central thesis is: this period...

The politics and ethics of participatory development have been a topic of vibrant debate since the 1990s. While proponents assert that participation emancipates and empowers marginalized people, critics assert that it enacts new forms of control and regulation. This paper reads these debates through the analytical lens offered by assemblage thinkin...

Resilience has become a foundational component within disaster management policy frameworks concerned with building 'cultures of safety' among vulnerable populations. These attempts at social engineering are justified through a discourse of agency and empowerment, in which resilience programming is said to enable marginalized groups to become self-...

This paper brings together Foucauldian approaches to biopolitics and recent developments in climate change and disaster studies on vulnerability, adaptation, and resilience to develop a biopolitics of adaptation. I approach climate change impact assessments, vulnerability approaches, and resilience approaches as distinct systems of knowledge with b...

This paper draws on assemblage theory and post-colonial theories to analyse the politics of community-based disaster resilience. Through a case study of community-based disaster resilience programming in Jamaica, I unpack the biopolitical strategies practitioners deploy in assembling cultures of safety and fashioning resilient subjects. My analysis...

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community-based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct...

The common narrative in disaster studies positions the field's paradigm shift from postevent response to preevent mitigation as a progressive development in knowledge on how to reduce disasters' impacts on public safety, human welfare, and development. Although the incorporation of participatory methods and vulnerability analysis has undoubtedly ma...

The 2007 launch of the Caribbean Catastrophic Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) introduced a new mechanism of state security against the uncertainties of climate change. Proponents argue that increasing the ability of member-states to finance disaster recovery through catastrophe insurance mitigates the effects of increasingly frequent and intense hu...

Dire warnings on the “dangers” of climate change are reinvigorating past debates over environmental security. However, one strain of this debate is exceeding the state-based logics of security found in more conventional environmental security approaches. The UNFCCC's goal of avoiding “dangerous climate change” that, inter alia, threatens sustainabl...

In this paper we want to open up for discussion what counts as 'biopolitics'-a term frequently used by critics and devotees alike to describe the organization of political power and authority in a world after Bretton Woods, the Cold War, and 9/11. We do so on two fronts. On the one hand, we contrast Foucault on war and the normalizing society, Agam...

The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be ov...