Sarah Marie Wiebe searches for strategies to resist disaster and incite joy

Sarah Marie Wiebe is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa with a focus on community development and environmental sustainability. She is a Co-Founder of the Feminist Environmental Research Network and a prolific writer. Her books include Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada's Chemical Valley, Biopolitical Disaster, Creating Spaces of Engagement: Policy Justice and the Practical Craft of Deliberative Democracy, Life Against States of Emergency, and very soon the book Hot Mess: Becoming a Mother during a Code Red Climate Emergency, which is set to come out from Fernwood Press in the near future. I wanted to talk to Sarah about what she calls the “points of connection” between “emotive” or “narrative” forms of communication and the work of “policy transformation.” There’s a point in this conversation where she admits that she’s still searching for examples of this in her work, and is clearly thrilled when she can find it, but it’s difficult to locate because we expect any sort of policymaking or deliberative process to be this cold, calculating thing, a means through which we reach consensus by rationally looking at all the data. But what can we make out of moments where the data of human experience radically exceeds the sorts of colonial logics that make policy? Sarah has a lot of faith in the power of arts-based strategies of policy transformation and affirming life against states of emergency. Part of the point is to convert anxiety into anger, despair into dedication, and the typically transactive parts of treaty into something far more transformative or iterative. What I really appreciate about the way that Sarah thinks through difficult problems is that she’s a settler scholar who doesn’t think it is acceptable for communicators to reduce the lives of Indigenous peoples to crisis. She realizes that there is power and import involved in naming and declaring an emergency, but grasps how focusing exclusively on crisis misrepresents and misunderstands the autonomy and vitality of Indigenous communities. So, the point, in some ways, is to identify and critique all of the colonial constraints–the siloed bureaucracy, the stunting education, the rapacious greed–that limits the flourishing of such communities. She describes this conundrum in terms of the “paradox of emergency,” or the paradox of locating democracy and democratic values in the context of emergency. It’s hard, when a crisis hits, to think about politics, but crises are inherently political, and the forms of expression that are licit or legible at the inception and in the perpetuation of crisis matter because they get to determine our response.