Resoulience: Reimagining Resilience (and Ourselves)

Abstract

Weaving in a personal journey that reflects on the entanglements of justice and victimhood, this invitation to reimagine resilience proposes a spiritual framework that humanizes us. In this paper, the cultural, physical, social, and spiritual possibilities of resilience are explored, particularly through rewriting resilience as multidimensional and productive—humanizing. Through a proposal to undiscipline resilience and interrogate how “justice” is positioned, we reconsider picturing resilience differently, as re[soul]ience. There are countless exemplary demonstrations of resoulience, constructive resilience, transformative resistance, and/or transformative resilience that are not chronological, but rather sociocultural and spiritual. Examples of communities, particularly those most marginalized and oppressed have demonstrated, through time, space, and genetics, across generations, that transcendence is not only passed on as a form of sociocultural knowledge production, pedagogy and praxis, but also through our inherent nobility, our spiritual DNA. A few cases of such communities are presented here. Resoulience proposes a perspective beyond resilience that is intergenerational, sustainable, and manifest in our physical, social, and spiritual afterlives.