Being in ‘relation’ but not necessarily in ‘community’: An alternative pathway for climate resilience

Abstract

Abstract This paper considers the role of community in climate resilience discourse through a post‐qualitative, autoethnographic lens. While community is frequently positioned as a stable and necessary unit of collective strength, this work challenges such assumptions by foregrounding its instability and ongoing reassembly. Drawing from affect theory, assemblage thinking and relational ethics and care, the inquiry resists representational methods instead embracing a situated, processual form of knowing grounded in daily practices of journalling, meditation, self‐observation and attunement. What emerges is not a set of findings about community but a perceptual shift from within it: from viewing community as a coherent entity to experiencing it as a contingent, uneven ‘meshwork’ of relations. The paper offers a practice‐based model of relational resilience that does not rely on fixed collectives but cultivates ethical responsiveness in the midst of impermanence and partial connection. What emerges are five interrelated practices of: attuning to the body; recognising the effects of social constructs of community; witnessing; allowing assemblage to replace belonging; and discerning how and when to engage. Rather than seeking to repair or restore community as a lost ideal, it reframes resilience as the capacity to engage adaptively with what is already in motion. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.