Recent researches have shown that, while resilience has been an efficient performative concept in many disasters management projects, the “back to normal” paradigm on which it relies does not offer a useful framework to think about local population’s claims for social change. For the pacific islands facing climate change adverse effects – including but not limited to sea level rise and important degradation of their environment biodiversity – the common understanding of resilience also fail to address the non reversible “loss and damages” defined in 2013 by the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damages and the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Based on an anthropological research among scientists and local communities developing a data science infrastructure to facilitate ecological and cultural preservation in French Polynesia, this paper focuses on the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) consortium, which provides an exemplary case study of the complex nature of technological and scientific infrastructure association, community organization and institutional setup embedded in climate change mitigation.
“Islands are much more than a writer’s inspiration, a scientist’s laboratory, a metaphor. They are home to islanders, who are both the same as … yet different from everyone else” (Unesco, 2007). Taking seriously the importance of diverse epistemologies involved in the assemblages described above, we will show how data science infrastructures contribute to make visible the hybridation of knowledge between western science and the Polynesian culture. Reflecting of these processes of hybridizations and associations, the paper finally argues that resilience might not be a one fit all concept but can only be applied in specific contexts/situations and should be thought in association with the concept of attention developed by researchers of the Actor Network Theory (ANT).
Speaker(s)
Charlotte Cabasse
Charlotte Cabasse-Mazel is now the Executive Director of the Digital Humanities Center, jointly launched by the University of Lausanne (UniL) and the Polytechnical School of Lausanne (EPFL).
Charlotte Cabasse-Mazel holds a PhD in Geography and Science and Technologies Studies from the University of Paris-Est, where she studied at the Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS), at Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. She is interested in the ways in which practices and methodologies of data science transform production of knowledge and interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as scientific personae and trajectories within the academic institution.
Her PhD research focused on the creation of hybrid communities and the transformation of subjects (both resident/expert) and space, facing risk of natural disasters in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Previously researcher at EPFL, Switzerland, she worked on research projects questioning the definition of “science”, “society”, “future” and “risk”. She also participated to join research-action project with UN Agencies (ISRD, WHO) in Madagascar.
Before going back to graduate school, she was a civil servant in French Embassy in South Africa and an NGO project coordinator for Aide Médicale Internationale (AMI) in Afghanistan and Indonesia. She also worked as a web and freelance journalist, having collaborated with French local and national newspapers.
She received her MA in Cultural Geography from Université de Reims, France; and MA and BA in Information and Communications Sciences from Université de la Sorbonne, Paris, France.