Resilience's problem of the present: reconciling social justice and future-oriented resilience planning in the Transition Town movement

Abstract

Using ethnographic data gathered from more than two years of fieldwork in a rural Vermont ‘Transition Town’ – a social movement oriented toward building resilience – this article examines how the conceptual groundwork of ‘resilience’ makes it difficult to work on socio-economic concerns in the here-and-now. It offers a close examination of the material objects that are interwoven with ‘building resilience’ in Transition Towns organising, creating the affective infrastructure on which the proliferating crises of the future are constructed. The desirable objects of resilience, via this affective infrastructure, serve to suture the imagined past with the imagined future, weaving hope, fear, grief, guilt, anticipation and excitement into resilience practice as inextricable parts of the work of resilience. And in turn, this suturing elides the necessary work for socioeconomic justice in the present moment. I suggest that, as a result of this problem with the present, the resilience concept makes it difficult t...