
The ‘killer viz’ for Soubry and Sherren (2022), showing contrasting discourses around resilience between Maritime farmers and the feds.
The third and final paper from Bernard Soubry’s PhD thesis is finally out in Land Use Policy, “You keep using that word…”: Disjointed definitions of resilience in food systems adaptation. Usually, when people use quotes at the start of a paper title, it comes from something one of the participants said. This time, it comes from The Princess Bride, a favourite movie in our house (in which the word in question is “inconceivable”). The term resilience is one of those panchrestons that can be difficult to grapple with, but Bernard did a great job of deconstructing its use in his interviews with Maritime farmers, and contrasting that with expressions of resilience in the same House and Senate reviews of agriculture and climate change that former postdoc Wes Tourangeau used in his last paper with me. Such secondary data sources provide a rare insight into the world of policy. This is also a great example of a qualitative ‘killer viz’ that draws on rich inductive coding without quantification.