We’ve just recorded a new podcast with Zainab Farooqui for Listen: Crisis Response Journal, reflecting on our ongoing work in New Orleans and the ideas developed in our recent book, Performing New Orleans. It was important for us to record this conversation while we were in the city itself, as being present in New Orleans allowed the discussion to be grounded in lived experience, ongoing relationships, and the realities of place.
Rather than treating the book as an endpoint, the recording allowed for a new conversation on what happens when research is developed in dialogue with a city—and tested in dialogue with communities, practitioners and institutions.
The discussion challenges dominant, often neoliberal, understandings of resilience that shift responsibility from systems to individuals. Instead, we explored how resilience is already being practised by artists, cultural organisations and communities, and what emergency managers can learn from this. From Mardi Gras to muraling, from theatre companies delivering food during COVID to everyday street-level creativity, arts practices reveal both how cities absorb shocks and how they live with and manage long-term stresses.
Crucially, the podcast argues for paying artists, consulting meaningfully, and recognising arts organisations as strategic resilience actors in their own right—not simply as delivery mechanisms for existing policy. We also discuss why resilience frameworks need to value qualitative, lived experience alongside metrics, and how infrastructure itself “performs” in people’s daily lives.
For resilience professionals, the message is clear: a whole‑of‑society approach means learning from existing cultural practices, valuing local expertise, and making space for more human, creative, and equitable forms of resilience planning.
We look forward to the podcast going live (and also to CRJ’s book review of Performing New Orleans), thanks Zainab for a fascinating discussion!