ABSTRACT
Heather Chappells (0000-0002-8985-3418) and Frank Trentmann (0000-0002-3290-1706)
Disruption has many connotations. It can be seen as a temporary intrusion to ‘normal’ life or as part of a continuous reordering of infrastructures and practices. Different interpretations of disruption, and its relation to normality, in turn influence the framing of responses or resilience. Should societies focus efforts on the short-term mitigation of temporary crises or accept disruption as a normal feature of everyday life to be dealt with through long-term adaptation. Using insights from historical cases of energy and water disruptions (droughts, fuel shortages, ice storms) in Europe and North America this chapter explores the evolving relationship between disruption and normality in and across time. From the micro-analysis of households’ coping strategies in a discrete moment of drought to consideration of macro-structuring conditions that feed into the management of energy supply problems across decades, we show that disruption is almost always situated within the longer-term development of resource politics, material infrastructures and social practices. Resilience in turn arises out of these pre-existing contexts of everyday life and is rarely a stand-alone response. Coping with disruption relates to long-term processes of routine adaption, which means there is still much to be learnt from the past as we look towards living with uncertainty and scarcity in the future.
