Community pathways to resilience: Activist, survivor, and conservator communities in Cardiff

Georgiou, Panayiota 2025. Community pathways to resilience: Activist, survivor, and conservator communities in Cardiff. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The aim of this research is to explore how actors within communities are coming together to influence their communities’ resilience. Drawing on the community resilience literature, the research identifies the need for an empirical examination of how resilience discourse plays out at the local and community level, focusing on what communities are doing and how they are reacting to policies of community resilience. The research is based on a case study of the city of Cardiff, using a combination of publicly available documents (77) and semi-structured interviews (45) with salient actors from the local authority and community to explore how communities seek to influence community affairs. The study utilises Fligstein and McAdam’s Strategic Action Fields (SAFs) theory (2011) as a theoretical lens to understand community resilience in Cardiff as a SAF, focusing on actors’ agency, in terms of their social skill, collective action, and power. The research combines thematic analysis with Fairclough’s (2010) method of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in line with a constructivist approach, with the purpose of understanding the power relationships that exist within the SAF and how the interactions between actors inform their practices and understandings of resilience. Through this analysis, a typology of three community pathways to resilience (activist, survivor, conservator) is developed to explain how communities in Cardiff are organising to exercise their agency in relation to resilience. The findings make two contributions to SAFs theory: (1) empirically demonstrating that social actors in SAFs are indeed thinking and acting strategically to influence something, in this case their communities’ development and resilience; and (2) revealing the critical role that place should play within SAFs theory. Overall, the research highlights the value of an organisational perspective for understanding the jockeying of actors and power dynamics within the SAF of community resilience.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Business (Including Economics)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	8 July 2025
Last Modified:	08 Jul 2025 14:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/179625

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