Sociologist Edits Book on Resilience and Community Development

By Edwin B. Smith

University of Mississippi

Anne Cafer, associate dean for research, scholarship and graduate education in the University of Mississippi College of Liberal Arts, is the primary editor of a new book examining how resilience influences community development.

“More Than Bouncing Back: Examining Community Resilience and Practice” (Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2023) features a collection of essays from leading scholars in the field. John J. Green, director of the Southern Rural Development Center at Mississippi State University and former director of the UM Center for Population Studies, and Gary Goreham, professor emeritus of sociology at North Dakota State University, are co-editors.

The book’s concepts are gaining support in academic and real-world applications as communities work to improve their resilience capacity, said Cafer, an associate professor of rural sociology and former director of the Center for Population Studies.

“I solicited the work that was developed into chapters, organized peer review and made decisions on what was ultimately included in the volume,” she said. “The audience for the book is community development practitioners, scholar-practitioners, community-based researchers and community groups.”

Experts who contributed to the volume are Jim Cavaye, Helen Ross, Jim Worstell and Linda Shenk.

“As a highly rural state, the content in this book presents methodologies and frameworks that are designed for Mississippi in many ways,” Cafer said. “Two of the editors are at Mississippi IHLs. 

“This means for the first time, we have a curated set of tools that rural communities in Mississippi can plug into without having to change and adapt them.”