Building Trust Through Stories in Port St. Joe

Building Trust Through Stories in

Port St. Joe

Open and strategic communication is a fundamental basis for trust. Through the stories we tell and the language we use, we can influence beliefs and behaviors. In Port Saint Joe (PSJ) – as is common in towns and cities around the United States – not all stories are heard equally and not all local knowledge is understood or valued equally. This research project brings together expertise in disaster social studies (Dr Jason von Meding) and behavioral social psychology (Dr Colin Tucker Smith) and focuses on the dilemmas of knowledge, communication and trust faced by the Black community of North Port Saint Joe (NPSJ). Using participatory methods based on community photography and collective interpretation (Photovoice), the research team worked alongside community members in NPSJ to document the lived experience of residents, with a view

towards empowering strategic and transformational change. Putting the voices and creative talents of residents at the center of the project adds power and emotion to the narratives that emerge. Some of the key themes emerging from our project relate to the sense of belonging/connection to a place that residents hold dear, as well as the pride that is felt in being part of a local culture and history. The project has brought into focus stories of resistance and survival in the face of overwhelming odds, and these narratives of resilience demonstrate that the people of NPSJ possess talents, skills and resources that have protected them in oppressive circumstances, but would also help them to thrive in the absence of structural barriers.

• How does a community experiencing risk created in part by systemic/structural inequalities perceive their own power/strength/capacity/agency?

• How can authentic stories rooted in countering the narratives of oppressive power act as liberating processes for the storytellers?

• What are the conditions needed to build trust between those facing systemic oppression (e.g., racist policies) and the beneficiaries of the status quo?

• How can stories about risk and resilience contribute to community organizing to combat the re-creation of risk? How can narratives change policy and practice?

The research is significant a) Through the research process itself and b) Through the storied accounts of the participants. It is critical to note that this research was undertaken WITH a community, rather than FOR or ABOUT a community – this meant involving community elders in every step of the process. This is in itself a deviation from the norm in disaster research and responds to the unequal power dynamics between researchers and communities, and the sometimes extractive nature of fieldwork.

The data itself focused on the hidden narratives in the NPSJ community as a result of placing control of the data in the hands of local people who could center local experiences. A feature of photovoice projects is the potential to challenge dominant narratives about the people involved. The research has uncovered data about the NPSJ community which might otherwise remain hidden. According to participants, NPSJ has become increasingly isolated from the rest of PSJ over the past 50 years due to closure of schools and businesses in the community, aging infrastructure and a lack of investment. The data generated by the project emphasizes the value of people in this community and the potential they have to improve their place with necessary and deserved investment from the city and state.

As Lawler (2002) argues, communities are likely to produce accounts of themselves that are “storied,” thus photovoice provides a fitting means for community members to express their experiences of place (vis-a-vis culture, history, society, participation, adversity, solidarity) and to reflect on emerging themes of the research. While photovoice has promoted critical dialogue between citizens, advocacy groups, and decision makers in both planning (Nowell et al. 2006; Nykiforuk et al. 2011) and public health arenas (Wang 1999; Lopez et al. 2005; Annang et al. 2016), scholars have also indicated its aptness for studying disaster resilience (Schumann et al. 2018).

We engaged the local community via the North Port St. Joe Project Area Coalition (NPSJ-PAC), in particular Mr. Dannie Bolden, Vice-President, NPSJ-PAC. This enabled us to work directly with a group of community elders. We dedicated additional time for building relationships with elders as per the photovoice protocols, but once we had established this network it became the driving force of the project. Engagement was commenced face-to-face until COVID prohibited this at which point we moved to email, phone, and zoom. An important feature of this project was building personal relationships with senior members of the community and reflecting on the research process alongside them, amending the plan of action accordingly.

A feature of photovoice methodology is its liberating potential for participating communities – building critical consciousness and supporting social action (Seedat et al. 2015). In this project, members of the NPSJ community engaged in activities that caused them to pause and reflect on the particular place-based characteristics of NPSJ. In the course of photographing their community, they were encouraged to consider what makes their place unique, what they love about it, and what holds the utmost value to them within an overall scope of “narratives of resilience”.

The project seeks to address equity through the power of storytelling. We argue that authentic accounts paired with imagery created by local people can elicit and inspire empathy in those outside of the community. This is important because many decisions are made for this community by outsiders. Centering and promoting the stories of the people of NPSJ can allow the community to organize around powerful visions of what the community is and can become. The outputs of the project (pop-up exhibition) can be of practical use in advocacy efforts for equitable development.

We have found that it is difficult (but not impossible) to do photovoice research during a pandemic without face-to-face engagement. For us it meant modifying the research protocol and IRB approval to substitute face-to-face activities for virtual ones – this took a lot of additional time. In addition, using a community-centered and community-led approach means giving up some control of the schedule in which things will be done. This is essential if researchers are to build trust with the community, but can be daunting given that our research environment is deadline-driven. That said, we remain committed to decentering our power in the entire research process. If we had foreseen COVID-19, we might have been more realistic with our expectations regarding the scheduling of activities. We missed chances to spend more time in January and February in NPSJ getting to know people in person, building trust and a working dynamic as co-creators of knowledge.

Our initial group of photovoice participants are primarily community elders, and we would like to do further rounds of photovoice with other demographics. This would provide different perspectives that would most certainly be interesting to compare. We are also interested in further developing our relationship with the NPSJ-PAC and with individuals in the community for further research collaborations. For example, we are exploring the possibility of assisting Clarence Monnett in the archiving of local oral and photographic histories of African-Americans in Port St Joe. We would love to connect this work with the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at UF.

The near-term implications of the project involve gathering the community together in self-reflection, creating opportunities for collective reflection, empowerment and belonging. The upcoming pop-up exhibition will be an exciting contribution to local community advocacy efforts, while geolocating the photographs and stories of NPSJ as part of a website in Fall 2020 will create a public-facing story archive. In the longer-term, we are creating data that supports community efforts to secure investment and support development processes, as well as building trusting relationships for future research collaborations.

The premise of this project has been the idea of building trust between a community that has faced historical injustice and those external to the community that often make decisions for them about them. For this reason, a multi-disciplinary approach was required to not only grapple with the social/economic/political origins of risk but why people behave how they do, and how trust is created – therefore the partnership between disaster research and psychology was key. Although we have not yet been able to closely work with the other teams, we hope to draw on the expertise emerging from study of cultural heritage in NPSJ, in order to link its outcomes to our photovoice project.

TEAM

Dr. Jason Von Meding, Associate Professor, M.E Rinker, Sr. School of Construction Management, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER), Jason.vonmeding@ufl.edu

Dr. Colin Tucker Smith, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, colinsmith@ufl.edu

Community Partners: North Port St. Joe Project Action Committee (NPSJ-PAC) Board of Directors, Dannie Bolden and Marquita Thompkins. Victoria Colvin, Research Assistant, Department of Psychology; Collin Bowie, Research Assistant, FIBER; Deborah von Meding, Editorial assistance.

Florida Resilient Cities