Interpretations of Resilience and Change and The Catalytic Roles of Media: A Case of Canadian Daily Newspaper Discourse on Natural Disasters

The varied interpretations of the concept of resilience in natural hazards research literature has attracted numerous criticisms. A common criticism centers around a poor understanding of the changes caused by natural disasters by the research stream. Considering resilience as a metaphor of change, and newspaper as a catalyst that often highlights post-disaster opportunities for “forward looking” (rather than bouncing back) changes, we examined some specific aspects of change in Canadian communities by analyzing coverage of natural disasters in daily newspapers. We posit that post-disaster newspaper discourse on resilience and change can not only assist enhancing academic inquiries on resilience but also contribute to improving practices for transformative changes in post-disaster contexts. We adopted a social constructivist approach to analyzing newspaper discourse, using the ProQuest database to find articles from the 1996–2017 period. The findings exhibited a trend of the increased use of narratives on resilience in Canadian newspapers since the 1990s that substantiates the hypothesis that transformative change in the personal and practical spheres requires alteration of peoples’ attitude, behavior, and thinking toward environmental risks. The discourse emphasized incremental changes at the policy level: (i) to improve response and recovery, and (ii) to address the needs of vulnerable and disaster-affected population. Our findings overall underscore the importance of documentation and efforts towards streamlining learning; application of learning at multiple interconnected levels for progressive changes to enhance community resilience, and the need for building consensus among academicians, practitioners and policy makers regarding the meaning and use of the concept of resilience.