RESCuE 6th Consortium Meeting from 23.-26. February 2016 in Saariselkä, Inari (Finland)
The consortium met in Saariselkä in northern Finland, home of the Sami people. The main goals were to present and to discuss the international report on WP 6, which examined the longitudinal and biographical aspects of resilience and WP 7 that deals with the spatial dimensions of resilience. We also agreed on developing a draft of the upcoming book on RESCuE and our homepage.
In the presentation of WP6, we gained insight on the difference between the historical timeline and self-experience visible in narrations. Historical and biographical time are meeting each other at the point of crisis, and potentially differing afterwards and before, which suggests that there are different layers of time.
Our national reports on WP 7 we analysed the spatial dimensions of resilience by focusing on four different levels of spatiality: body, home/household/house, neighbourhood/community and the supralocal level.
The presentations showed that crisis not only affected the body in different ways but also changed household conditions in Europe. In Greece (and also in Spain) for example, intergenerational dynamics reversed as children now seek help from their parents and move back in their family home. This is important as the house can be seen as the head of resilience in Greece. In contrast, the Finnish team found resilience to be more rooted on the level of the body. The Sami reindeer herders have a culture of everyday practice, where the body is a kind of tool. It has adjusted itself to the Arctic outside work. The house is a public place and open to the wider family, neighbours and other Sami visitors, as well as the forest is a similar public place. These places are only private for “outsiders” who are not part of the reindeer herder communities. On the level of the community, the reindeer herding is not only a socioeconomic, but also a cultural practice of resilience. But resilience is not only about creating resources, as we found in a picture of the German team. A woman took a photograph of a yellow flower and stated that the mere view of these flowers raises her mood and gives her strength. By looking at the level of the body, these aspects can be examined detailed.
Regarding the supralocal level, we discussed the importance of supralocal processes in the economic crisis and decided that the role of public goods, the welfare state and the property order will be a point of further analysis in the international report. Current processes, like migration, seem to have a tremendous impact on people. Furthermore, it became clear to us that mobility as a deeply spatial concept seems to be a very important aspect in all scales. We learned from the Spanish team about the definition of motility by John Urry (Mobilities 2007), which declares the ability to move being an important aspect to modern social live and analysis.
The RESCuE team also decided to have an additional summer meeting in Poland to provide space for additional discussions on our coming topics, before the next regular meeting will bring us together with our scientific advisory board and stakeholder group in autumn.