Grove, Kevin
- Associate Professor, Global and Sociocultural Studies , Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs

Overview
overview
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My research broadly works across political geography, cultural geography, political ecology and security studies to examine the biopolitics of disaster management and resilience. Resilience has become an increasingly influential ordering principle for all manner of social and environmental governance initiatives, in fields as varied as international development, urban governance, disaster management, psycholoty and community development. Through fieldwork in Kingston, Jamaica, New York City, Miami, and the Florida Coastal Everglades, I analyze how this resilience turn creates a new terrain for political struggle. On one hand, within the interconnected, emergent, and artificial environments of the Anthropocene, resilience enables scholars and practitioners to visualize and work on the intimate, affective relations that circulate between and across humans and the non-human world. As I argue in a number of articles in journals such as the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode, and Security Dialogue, resilience initiatives such as community-based disaster management and catastrophe insurance mobilize techniques of affective engineering to delimit our immanent potential to create new worlds. Thus, even as resilience initiatives hold out the promise of increasing sustainability and empowering individuals and communities to manage their own vulnerabilities, in practice, resilience initiatives often shore up racialized political economic inequalities that create these insecurities in the first place.
On another hand, the concept of resilience also has a degree of plasticity that enables it to be ethically and politically pliable. As I detail in my book Resilience, published by Routledge in 2018, the roots of resilience thinking lie in a modernist design aesthetics that apprehends the world as abstract objects given to functional synthesis. What exists, for resilience thinkers as well as designers, is less a question of what something is than what something can potentially do. Resilience theory revolutionizes the study of human-environment relations to the extent that it recalibrates thought and practice around a will to design: a drive or desire to synthesize otherwise distinct forms of knowledge in order to develop collaborative and cross-boundary solutions to contextually-specific problems of complexity. While a will to design fuels techniques of affective engineering, it also embeds within resilience thinking the possibilities for its own subversive transformation - for it compels us to ask what resilience itself might be able to do.
Thus, a key concern facing many scholars in geography and related fields today, and the overarching question of my own research, is how we might redesign resilience in the Anthropocene: what kinds of political projects might resilience thinking contribute to? How might we push the limits of resilience thinking to recognize other forms of suffering, insecurity and vulnerability, not just systemic vulnerabilities? What claims for recognition are various individuals and groups advancing in the name of building (or resisting) resilience? What techniques and strategies of power foreclose these claims and the possibilities for living together differently that they open? If the Anthropocene raises the question of what kind of world our politics might create, then this world-forming process will hinge on the ways we are able to redesign resilience in the Anthropocene.
research interests
- Environmental security, development, geopolitics, Caribbean political economy, vulnerability, adaptation and resilience, urban political ecology
Scholarly & Creative Works
selected publications
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Article
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2022Design-driven resilience and the limits of geographic critiqueFull Text via DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12437 Web of Science: 000774001400001
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2021Red tape, slow emergency, and chronic disease management in post-Maria Puerto RicoFull Text via DOI: 10.1080/09581596.2021.1998376 Web of Science: 000716831200001
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2021Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the AnthropoceneFull Text via DOI: 10.1080/2325548x.2021.1960024
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2021The asymmetrical anthropocene: resilience and the limits of posthumanismFull Text via DOI: 10.1177/14744740211029278 Web of Science: 000673660000001
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2021Insurantialization and the moral economy of ex ante risk management in the CaribbeanFull Text via DOI: 10.1080/03085147.2020.1853363 Web of Science: 000621315700001
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2020Designing justice? Race and the limits of recognition in greater Miami resilience planningFull Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.09.014 Web of Science: 000592912200015
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2020Slow emergencies: Temporality and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governanceFull Text via DOI: 10.1177/0309132519849263 Web of Science: 000538262700001
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2020Racializing Resilience: Assemblage, Critique, and Contested Futures in Greater Miami Resilience PlanningFull Text via DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1715778 Web of Science: 000520339500001
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2017Assemblage, transversality and participation in the neoliberal universityFull Text via DOI: 10.1177/0263775817709478 Web of Science: 000415061200009
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2015The Neutral State: A Genealogy of Ecosystem Service Payments in Costa RicaFull Text via DOI: 10.4103/0972-4923.164206 Web of Science: 000361056800008
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2015Security and the Politics of Resilience: An Aesthetic ResponseFull Text via DOI: 10.1111/1467-9256.12078 Web of Science: 000347706800010
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2015Assemblage Thinking and Participatory Development: Potentiality, Ethics, BiopoliticsFull Text via DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12191 Web of Science: 000364294500001
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2014Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster ResilienceFull Text via DOI: 10.1111/anti.12066 Web of Science: 000334273400002
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2014Biopolitics and Adaptation: Governing Socio-Ecological Contingency Through Climate Change and Disaster StudiesFull Text via DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12118 Web of Science: 000214354900004
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2014Agency, affect, and the immunological politics of disaster resilienceFull Text via DOI: 10.1068/d4813 Web of Science: 000337354800005
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2013From Emergency Management to Managing Emergence: A Genealogy of Disaster Management in JamaicaFull Text via DOI: 10.1080/00045608.2012.740357 Web of Science: 000317837800008
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2013Hidden transcripts of resilience: power and politics in Jamaican disaster managementFull Text via DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2013.825463 Web of Science: 000457900600003
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2012Preempting the next disaster: Catastrophe insurance and the financialization of disaster managementFull Text via DOI: 10.1177/0967010612438434 Web of Science: 000302856500003
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2010Insuring oOur Common Future?o Dangerous Climate Change and the Biopolitics of Environmental SecurityFull Text via DOI: 10.1080/14650040903501070 Web of Science: 000281360700006
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2009Biopolitics, biopower, and the return of sovereigntyFull Text via DOI: 10.1068/d3508 Web of Science: 000267953300007
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2009Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: Security, subjectivity, and the non-humanFull Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.09.005 Web of Science: 000264696800009
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Book
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2020Resilience in the anthropocene: Governance and politics at the end of the worldFull Text via DOI: 10.4324/9781003033370
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Book Chapter
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2018Adaptation machines, or the biopolitics of adaptation. 110-124.Full Text via DOI: 10.4324/9781351211185-8
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2018Disaster biopolitics and the crisis economy. 30-46.Web of Science: 000439475400005
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2016Resilience and the post-colonial: Hidden transcripts of resilience in Jamaican disaster management. 370-382.Full Text via DOI: 10.4324/9781315765006
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Book Review
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2021The Spatial Contract: A New Politics of Provision for an Urbanized Planet.. Ed. 45.Full Text via DOI: 10.1177/03091325211000456 Web of Science: 000638764100001
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Conference
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2019Interventions on design and political geographyFull Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.04.009 Web of Science: 000488420100016
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Other Scholarly Work
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2022To forty more years of Political GeographyFull Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102581 Web of Science: 000746408900004
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2021The uneven distribution of futurity: Slow emergencies and the event of COVID-19. 6-17.Full Text via DOI: 10.1111/1745-5871.12501 Web of Science: 000686305000001
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2021Virtual forum introduction: Populist nationalisms and new geographies of exclusionFull Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2021.102429 Web of Science: 000678533700001
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2021Islands of (in)security in the Anthropocene. 434-438.Full Text via DOI: 10.1177/20438206211017454 Web of Science: 000652321700001
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2021Making time in 2020Full Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102332 Web of Science: 000612162400012
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2020Political geography in and for 2020Full Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102258 Web of Science: 000577079100002
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2020Making and breaking boundaries in times of transitionFull Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102130 Web of Science: 000515443500001
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2019Critique, genealogy, recuperation. 201-204.Full Text via DOI: 10.1177/2043820619827752 Web of Science: 000473034400018
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2019Beyond bibliometrics. A1-A2.Full Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.12.004 Web of Science: 000457508600001
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2018An active role for political geography in our current conjunctureFull Text via DOI: 10.1111/gec3.12410 Web of Science: 000449990100005
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2018Political geography in the impasse. A1-A2.Full Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.10.007 Web of Science: 000424724600001
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2017Introduction: resilience and the Anthropocene: the stakes of 'renaturalising' politics. 79-91.Full Text via DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2016.1241476 Web of Science: 000457918800001
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Review
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2022Introduction: Virtual forum on the Russian invasion of UkraineFull Text via DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102673
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2017Security beyond resilience. 184-194.Full Text via DOI: 10.1177/0263775816686583 Web of Science: 000394776700011
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2013On resilience politics: from transformation to subversion. 146-153.Full Text via DOI: 10.1080/21693293.2013.804661 Web of Science: 000457899600005
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Research
principal investigator on
co-principal investigator on
- LTER: Coastal Oligotrophic Ecosystem Research awarded by National Science Foundation 2021 - 2025
- LTER: Drivers of Abrupt Change in the Florida Coastal Everglades awarded by National Science Foundation 2018 - 2022
subproject principal investigator on
- LTER: Coastal Oligotrophic Ecosystem Research awarded by National Science Foundation 2021 - 2025
- LTER: Drivers of Abrupt Change in the Florida Coastal Everglades awarded by National Science Foundation 2018 - 2022
investigator on
- Disasters, solar energy, and chronic disease management in aging Puerto Ricans awarded by National Institute on Aging 2022 - 2026
- Physician Migration and its Implications for Puerto Rico's health care system awarded by Minority Health and Health Disparities 2020 - 2024
- A Multi-Level Health Systems Study of Collapse and Resilience in Puerto Ricos's Response to Hurricane Maria awarded by National Institute on Aging 2019 - 2020
Contact
full name
- Kevin Grove
Identifiers
ORCID iD
- https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9114-5050 (confirmed)
visualizations
publication subject areas
Citation index-derived subject areas the researcher has published in