"Surviving Storms" - A talk with Dr Adom Philogene Heron (A TESS Talk)

Speaker: Dr Adom Philogene Heron Lecturer in Visual Anthropology, at the University of Bristol. He is founding co-director of the Bristol Caribbean Studies Studio and part of the Bristol Centre for Black Humanities. Previously he held a lectureship at Goldsmiths University, London. An ethnographer, Adom explores Black and indigenous ecologies, the enduring legacies of Bristolian slavery, and complexities of Caribbean kinship. From 2019-2023 Adom successfully spearheaded the GCRF Surviving Storms project, digitally mapping hurricane survivals in Dominica. His influential work appears in prominent journals such as Antipode and various multimodal platforms, contributing to crucial public dialogue on questions of repair and racial justice.

This paper tells a story of a community self-help project by villagers displaced from their homes in the aftermath of fatal landslides brought by Tropical Storm Erika in 2015. Centred on a film I made about this community koudmen (voluntary work group) among villagers restoring a road to their homes 6 years on from the storm, this paper is concerned with the complicated politics of climate displacement and a community’s unwavering commitment to secure access to ancestral lands and the livelihoods they host – to create a road to repair – in the long wake of disaster.

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