ID: 1983
Presenting Author: Aysima Calisan
Session: 629 - Post-Resettlement Realities: Trust, Housing, and Livelihoods Reconsidered
Status: pending
This paper explores how misinformation and mistrust shape resettlement communication and argues that Social Impact Assessment can help rebuild trust through dialogue and ethical engagement.
In an era of misinformation and disinformation, rebuilding trust has become a defining challenge for impact assessment and resettlement governance. Across project-induced, disaster-related, and climate-change-induced resettlement, a persistent “trust deficit” shapes relations between affected communities and institutions. While official narratives portray resettlement as protection or progress, they often obscure power relations, uneven knowledge hierarchies, and emotional realities of displacement. The result is not only social dislocation but also epistemic dissonance, where lived experience and institutional knowledge diverge in meaning and legitimacy. This paper conceptualizes post-resettlement communication as an arena of epistemic negotiation. It argues that misinformation in resettlement contexts is rarely random but stems from epistemic asymmetries—the exclusion of cultural and local experiential knowledge from technocratic discourse. Drawing on Social Impact Assessment and Giddens’s notion of trust in abstract systems, the paper examines how institutional mechanisms intended to ensure protection often fail to generate ontological security. When trust in expert systems weakens, emotions and suspicion fill the communicative void, amplifying misinformation. Through comparative reflections from South Africa and Türkiye, the paper illustrates how bridging institutional and lived narratives can transform resettlement from a compliance exercise into a trust-based, dialogical process.
Aysima Calisan is a researcher and practitioner conducting ethnographic research in the fields of migration, disaster management, and climate change.
Coauthor 1: Gwendolyn Wellmann