Resilience Discourse Research Articles

The Transformation of the Dilemma of Role Exchange in the Household: Analyzed Gender in Family Resilience Discourse in National Law and Islamic Law

This article analyzes the dilemma of changing roles in a household that is often unequal. Inequality occurs due to the wife's dominant role in meeting the family's needs; the wife bears a double burden compared to the husband. This study uses qualitative research with a literature research system through a formal juridical approach and gender analysis. The subject of this research refers to the articles in the Marriage Act and Compilation of Islamic Law. Researchers chose purposive sampling based on specific criteria and categories that can be described and analyzed. The findings of this study indicate the dilemma of relationships and roles in the household, where the ideal relationship within the family must be a provision for family resilience to realize national resilience. In addition, working women must be able to carry out their rights and obligations in a balanced way, even though information technology and the media are challenges to family life today. The optimization of the marriage guidance program and the reconstruction of Islamic Family Law and the Marriage Law must serve as an affirmation basis for the dynamics of marital relationship patterns. However, society must also understand that the social role of a partner is not absolute. His position can be exchanged as needed for the continuation of the marriage.

Towards resilient place emphasizing urban form: An assessment framework in urban design

The urban form resilience is a subset of urban resilience discourse, including various social, economic, and environmental aspects. Urban fabrics lacking a resilient place, as the base of urban form resilience, are at risk of deterioration and decreased environmental qualities during urban transformations. This study aims to develop a framework for assessing the urban form resilience on meso and micro scales, particularly in areas facing rapid development changes. Of 51 indicators developing the framework, 35 indicators are quantitatively related to ‘urban form’, while 16 indicators qualitatively indicate the ‘image’ and ‘behavior’ dimensions. Twenty academic Delphi panelists scored the indicators extracted through a comprehensive literature review in two rounds of the Delphi procedure. These indicators were finally weighted and ranked with agreement level and the Friedman test and validated with consistency and repeatability analysis. This assessment framework can quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate the indicators of urban form resilience through three dimensions: form, image, and behavior. The assessment framework can assist urban planners, designers, and policy-makers in delivering more effective interventions against changes by increasing the resilience of places in the urban transformation and development process.

Resilient states vs. resilient societies? The ‘dark side’ of resilience narratives in EU relations with authoritarian regimes: a case study of Belarus

ABSTRACT The present article maps and analyses the different meanings of the EU’s resilience narratives in its neighbourhood policy towards authoritarian regimes. While a large part of the existing literature has placed an emphasis on the role of resilience in EU foreign policy more generally, the specific use and representations of resilience in EU policy towards authoritarian regimes remains ill-explored. However, it is specifically in the context of the EU’s relations with authoritarian regimes, that references to resilience, and especially ‘state resilience’, are highly problematic. Focusing on the EU’s neighbourhood policy and the case of Belarus, we present a discourse analysis of the different uses of the term resilience in the official discourses of key EU institutions. In a first-order critique, we examine how the EU’s narratives construct resilience, and in particular for whom, what, when, where, and why. We show that the EU’s resilience discourses are inherently state-centric and present highly contradictory goals of resilience-building. In a second-order critique, we demonstrate the problematic political implications of the EU’s usage of the term resilience, including the omission of ‘everyday forms of resilience and resistance’ from the EU’s narratives.

Exploring everyday resilience in the creative industries through devised theatre: A case of performing arts students and recent graduates in Ghana

The concept of resilience has become widely used to account for how people respond both to acute crisis and, increasingly, to protracted precarity. Yet, cultural studies theorists have also vigorously critiqued resilience discourse as a tool of neoliberal governmentality. In this article, we turn from the discourse of resilience to the practice of resilience. We argue, through a case of theatre students and recent graduates in Ghana, that the practice of resilience can be both individual and collective. Moreover, we show that resilience practices involve the exercise of agency at various scales through the specific practices of coping, reworking, and resisting. Finally, we show the merits of using artistic research methods, such as devised theatre, to unveil the complex ways that creatives practice resilience in the everyday.

Social Justice in the Green City

The Covid-19 pandemic and energy, climate, and demographic crises have shown how cities are vulnerable to these impacts and how the access to green and blue spaces has become highly relevant to people. One strategy that we can observe is the strong focus on the resilience discourse, meaning implementing more green and blue spaces in urban areas, such as at previous brownfield quarters. However, social justice implications of urban greening have been overlooked for a long time. The implementation of strategies to improve the quality and availability of the green and blue infrastructures may indeed have negative outcomes as far as housing accessibility is concerned by trigging gentrification processes. Issues related to environmental justice and socio-spatial justice are increasing in contemporary cities and call for a better understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities. This thematic issue includes eleven articles with different methodologies, with examples from Europe and North America as well as different lenses of green gentrification. Some articles focus more on the question of costs, benefits, and distributional consequences of various infrastructural options for urban greening. Others, instead, discuss how the strategic urban planning tools and policy processes take into account distributional consequences, with specific attention on participatory processes.

“Everything will be all right (?)”: Discourses on COVID-19 in the Italian linguistic landscape

The study of the linguistic landscape (LL) focuses on the representations of languages on signs placed in the public space and on the ways in which individuals interact with these elements. Regulatory, infrastructural, commercial, and transgressive discourses, among others, emerge in these spaces, overlapping, complementing, or opposing each other, reflecting changes taking place and, in turn, influencing them. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of life, including cities, neighborhoods, and spaces in general. Against this background, the study of the LL is fundamental not only to better understand the ways in which places have changed and how people are interpreting and experiencing them but also to analyze the evolution of COVID-19 discourses since the pandemic broke out. This contribution aims to investigate how and in what terms the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on the Italian LL, considered both in its entirety, as a single body that, regardless of local specificities, responded to and jointly reflected on the shared shock, and specifically, assuming the city of Florence as a case study. The data collected in the three main phases of the pandemic include photographs of virtual and urban LL signs and interviews, which were analyzed through qualitative content analysis with the aim of exploring citizens' perceptions and awareness of changes in the LL of their city. The results obtained offer a photograph of complex landscapes and ecologies, which are multimodal, multi-layered, and interactive, with public and private discourses that are strongly intertwined and often complementary. Furthermore, the diachronic analysis made it possible to identify, on the one hand, points in common with the communication strategies in the different phases, both at a commercial and regulatory level. On the other hand, strong differences emerged in the bottom-up representations, characterized in the first phase by discourses of resilience, tolerance, hope, solidarity, and patriotism, and in the second and third phases by disillusionment, despair, and protest.

Student stories of resilience after campus sexual assault

Undergraduate students who experience campus sexual assault (CSA) are faced with a wide array of potentially detrimental mental health and educational outcomes that may significantly impact their sense of wellbeing. Many researchers have focused on documenting these consequences of CSA, but there is a dearth of research on students’ post-assault experiences. Specifically, there is a lack of scholarship exploring students’ lived experiences of navigating their post-assault lives in their campus environment through the lens of resilience. The purpose of this study was to explore the phenomenon of resilience among undergraduate students who have experienced CSA, through a qualitative phenomenological inquiry. This study used critical conceptual understandings of resilience, including socio-ecological and intersectional feminist theoretical perspectives and social work discourses of resilience, to further complicate how the phenomenon is often described in scholarship. The findings revealed four key themes of the phenomenon to include resilience within the context of agency, coping, connection, and hope. Recommendations and implications across social work research, policy, and practice are presented, specifically those identified by the participants as recommendations for change in addressing CSA and supporting student experiences of resilience.

Rethinking ‘Hope’ and ‘Resilience’ in the Anthropocene: An Interview with David Chandler

This is an interview with David Chandler, Professor of International Relations at Westminster University, UK, a leading scholar in the field of international politics and policy discourses of resilience in the Anthropocene. This interview explores the challenges presented by the Anthropocene and the ways that discourses of ‘hope’ and ‘resilience’ might effectively reflect and negotiate them.

Resilience and Return in Isaiah—Using Resilience Theory in Hebrew Scripture Theology

The article analyses the theology of homecoming in the book of Isaiah and makes a case for using resilience theory as a hermeneutical frame for the task of Hebrew Scripture theology. Defined as “positive adaptation despite adversity”, resilience builds on the crisis setting of wide parts of the Hebrew Scriptures and demonstrates that the formation of theology represents a resilience discourse. In the case of the Isaianic prophecies of return, three concepts of return are distinguished (return, gathering and homecoming, a second Exodus) that respond to the adversities of exile and diaspora. Thus, the prophecies offer a literary home that the different religious communities through time can inhabit.

Governing the resilient city: An empirical analysis of governing techniques

Resilience is increasingly used as a new discourse for dealing with future shocks, crises and transition in urban governance. Although embraced in policy and academia, resilience is also severely critiqued as a continuation of neo-liberal thinking. To avoid the trap of imposing a meta-narrative on resilience, we argue that resilience should be treated as a ‘matter of empirics’. Using a governmentality lens, we empirically investigate how the resilient city is governed in practice. Based on a multi-sited ethnography of resilience within the city of Rotterdam that joined the 100-RC initiative pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation, we identify five governing techniques: anticipating, transcending, laboratizing, monitoring and responsibilizing. Our analysis shows that resilience discourse has the potential to be both progressive and cruel, depending on the techniques used and the interactions between them. Hence, how resilience is shaped not only depends on the individual techniques but also on their entanglements in practice.

People and politics: Urban climate resilience in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The rapid growth Cambodia has experienced over the past two decades has resulted in a dramatic transformation of its built environment, in particular, its largest city, Phnom Penh. The shape this urban development has taken echoes that of many developing countries whose urban landscape features gleaming skyscrapers, apartment buildings, and edge-city projects spread across a rapidly expanding urban area. Such a pattern of urbanization is occurring in Phnom Penh while the city faces increased flooding, lack of adequate urban infrastructure, and vulnerability to impacts of climate change. At the same time, embedded within national policy discourses of climate change and social/economic planning, and backed by international donors, are calls for strengthening or developing resilience. Yet, in the city there are signs of land dispossession, marginalization, inequality, and exacerbated poverty. In parallel to high-level discourses of urban resilience, on the ground there have been “everyday forms of resilience” that show how people enact and build resilience through collective action and advocacy for the rights of the urban poor. In reconciling this dichotomy, we argue that the continued reproduction of a technocratic-focused discourse on resilience in Cambodia by national and international actors overshadows the everyday contestations, strategies and resilience-making practices of people in urban areas. Through three examples, we showcase the varying ways in which these contestations and strategies occur in, and despite, an environment of suppression, and how they are challenging the status quo. In doing so, we shed light not only on the politics of resilience but, more importantly, the implications of the political agendas that ultimately contribute to exacerbating vulnerabilities of urban residents, even as calls continue for increased urban “resilience.”

Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post–3.11 Japan by Mire Koikari

Reviewed by: Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post–3.11 Japan by Mire Koikari Margherita Long (bio) Gender, Culture, and Disaster in Post–3.11 Japan. By Mire Koikari. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. xii, 196 pages. $120.00, cloth; $39.95, paper; $35.95, E-book. One of the most satisfying things this book does is reclaim feminism from a government policy called danjo kyōdō (男女共同), or gender coparticipation. Originally included in the Danjo Kyōdō Sankaku Kihonhō (Basic Act for Gender Equal Society, 1999), the concept gained new relevance after 3.11 when the Abe Shinzō administration adopted its principles to promote Japan as a champion of "gender and resilience whose expertise benefits other nations in Asia and the Pacific" (p. 45). Author Mire Koikari, a senior scholar of sociology and women's studies, performs close readings of disaster manuals for women issued by An-an magazine, Kurowassan magazine, trade presses, and the Tokyo municipal government. She shows how, far from promoting gender equality, the "risk management" and resilience (kyōjinka) discourses that proliferated after 3.11 call on women to embrace traditionally gendered care work and hold themselves, not the state, responsible for keeping families safe. Particularly powerful is Koikari's critique of a set of 2014 pamphlets issued by Abe's Gender Equality Bureau in English ("Learning from Adversity") and Japanese ("Danjo kyōdō sankaku [End Page 145] no shiten no bōsai, fukkō no torikumi shishin"). The pamphlets argue that, as the "chief agents" of resilience building, women must "share leadership roles in all aspects of the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) process" (pp. 44, 62). If women hold at least 30 per cent of leadership roles, the pamphlets maintain, then sanitary napkins and infant items won't be forgotten from stockpiled supplies, and childcare, eldercare, and sexual assault prevention won't be forgotten at evacuation shelters. Koikari points to the slippage between the terms "equality" and "coparticipation," noting that the former is missing from the substance of the policies and guidebooks and that the latter "sanctif[ies] maternal duties and obligations" (p. 65). Her point is that feminism should open spaces for thought and action outside neoliberalism and neoconservatism, rather than accept them as the status quo. She quotes David Harvey on the perverse cycle in which neoliberalism and neoconservatism reinforce each other, because atomization, individualism, and competition in a neoliberal economy create instability, insecurity, and disorder, and these in turn lead to nationalist calls for morality, solidarity, and tradition (p. 20). Reading calls for care work by women as calls for just this sort of nationalism and tradition, Koikari traces Abe's post–3.11 policy to a June 2011 symposium convened by women instrumental in crafting the 1999 Danjo Kyōdō Sankaku legislation. During and after the 2011 symposium, all advocated "gender coparticipation" in disaster recovery, all pressed the government to adopt their ideas, and all, according to Koikari, "consider their mobilization a successful instance of women's and feminist activism" (p. 69). Readers get a glimpse of what might have prompted Koikari to write her book when we read about organizations set up by these same figures. Launched after the success of the 2011 symposium, their groups Women's Network for East Japan Disaster: Rise Together! and Japan Women's Network for Disaster Risk Reduction (JWNDRR), became "conspicuous presences" (p. 69) at international events hosted by, for instance, the United Nations. They also "actively pursu[ed] partnerships with the University of Hawai'i, the University of Delaware, United Nations University, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR)" (p. 69). What must it have been like for Koikari, a professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Hawai'i, to have been asked to partner with the JWNDRR? It is an interesting question for feminist academics on the left these days when feminist discourses, in Koikari's words, are "increasingly appropriated to enable, rather than obstruct, the entrenchment of dominant political, economic and cultural dynamics" (p. 71). If indeed an offer of collaboration was made, I think we can assume Koikari declined it. When we...

A ferida e seus contornos. Um discurso performativo sobre a ideia de felicidade

This work, aimed at students in the area of community services, carried out in Coruña (Spain) in March 2022, analyses a health prevention project, located halfway between the arts, psychology, education and social work, which uses performance to facilitate the identification of trauma and the incorporation of the experience as social learning. The researched event is analysed from the perspective of discursive practice and the production of meaning, with the aim of the actors generating a discourse of resilience. Three research techniques were chosen, documentary analysis, participant observation and public enquiry, in order to obtain depth in the conclusions and guarantee reliability. The results show the suitability of the performance for the elaboration of grief, by facilitating the expression and meaning of grief.

Making Thessaloniki Resilient? The Enclosing Process of the Urban Green Commons

In the global hegemonic resilience discourse, green infrastructure is projected as a “win-win” approach to urban planning. Following the trend of adopting resilience as the new silver bullet for urban development, and in the midst of the recent financial crisis, Thessaloniki, Greece, joined the 100 Resilient Cities network of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2014. This event marked a shift in the city’s public space production and governance programme, introducing new private actors in decision-making processes, an emphasis on green space economic benefits, and an extensive regeneration programme heavily focused on the city centre. The article scrutinises these changes to uncover the policy implications of the turn to resilience in green public space production. Based on data on green public space spatial distribution; semi-structured interviews with municipal representatives and senior employees and representatives of the government, civil society, and local professional associations; policy document analysis; and comparative analysis of all relevant development and planning documents, and drawing on Brenner and Theodore’s (2005) conceptualisation of neoliberalism, the article argues that greening policies in Thessaloniki form an ongoing enclosing process of the urban green commons that articulates in a threefold manner: their discursive construction as “natural assets,” the implementation of spatially selective policies, and the post-politicisation of decision-making processes.

Stories of decolonial resilience

ABSTRACT Many scholars, analysts and commentators have noted that the neoliberal conjuncture has seen the rise of a veritable explosion of discourses and theories of resilience. Some regard this discursive and narrative profusion as integral to the ongoing project of a neoliberal ‘worlding’ that seeks to reconfigure all aspects of human subjectivities and social relations. Meanwhile, the ongoing outpouring of neoliberal discourses and narratives of resilience is accompanied by the expansion of disasterscapes across the planet as we speed apparently toward what the Caribbean scholar Sylvia Wynter calls an ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’. Some of these expanding disasterscapes are emerging across the terrain of a five-hundred-year history of genocidal and appropriative colonial practices. The people and communities inhabiting these disasterscapes have been struggling to develop counter-praxes of collective cultural resilience and survival in the face of the many catastrophes wrought over the centuries by coloniality. We turn to Wynter’s concept of homo narrans to examine Indigenous praxes for the performative enactment of alternative genres of the human that contest the worlding of neoliberal discourses and apparatuses of resilience. Wynter’s contributions to the de-universalization and thus relativization of Eurocentric ‘Man’ aim to make the present proliferation of the genres of humanity, our storytelling species, culturally intelligible in ways that might not only undercut the work done by neoliberal discourses of resilience toward the production of disastrous consequences in places like Guatemala and the obliteration of our capacities to imagine the world otherwise, but perhaps even ward off the potentially impending ‘unparalleled catastrophe for our species’. This paper draws on our ongoing research in Guatemala, which involves Indigenous and poor ladino survivors of the 2018 eruption of the Fuego Volcano, as well as survivors of the 2005 landslide that followed Hurricane Stan.

Resilience, infrastructure and the anti-social contract in neoliberal Britain

‘Resilience’, a quintessentially neoliberal concept, has never been a politically neutral discourse, its intellectual roots situated in the work of Friedrich Hayek and the birth of neoliberal economics. Nevertheless, resilience in infrastructure is often cast as a technocratic, apolitical consideration. This article argues that this is not the case. Using data collected during fieldwork with the UK Government Cabinet Office during a consultation on how to make infrastructure ‘resilient by design’, resilience discourse is shown to be a tool with which government departments, regulators and companies make communities increasingly responsible for the provision and maintenance of their own infrastructure while justifying service failures as inevitable. This is an under-explored discursive battleground in the neoliberal reframing of the social contract as anti-social; concerning the profit-driven logics of corporate entities as balanced by the rights of individual consumers, and no longer about the relationship between ‘the state’ and a collective civil society.

“Israel is Drying, Again”: Constructing Resilience Discourses in Televised Water Conservation Campaigns

ABSTRACT Water conservation campaigns (WCC) are a common tool for mitigating droughts and water scarcity by encouraging reductions in household consumption. This paper moves beyond examining the impact of WCCs on consumption to look at the ways in which these campaigns discursively construct notions of water resilience. By analyzing eight televised WCCs produced by the Israel Water Authority from 2008 to 2018 in response to recurring droughts, this paper shows how discourses of resilience are audio-visually and symbolically constructed and represented to the public. The results indicate that a variety of opposite and competing discursive strategies were used in these campaigns: motivational, instructive or informative, fear/hope, nationalistic/individualistic and eco-centric/anthropocentric. The longitudinal comparison reveals how the discourse of water resilience evolved over the years from resilience by resistance to transformation and adaptation, confined to depolitical ethical-individual behavioral change while ignoring government responsibility, systemic social-environmental causes of the problem, and climate change.

Postdisaster relocation and its impacts on family dynamics: a case study of typhoon Ketsana relocation in the Philippines

PurposeIn the realm of disaster risk reduction (DRR) efforts and disaster resilience discipline globally, the impacts of disasters at the family level – especially in terms of interpersonal relationships – remain largely understudied. This paper aims to explore the impacts of postdisaster relocation on the internal dynamics of families in Southville 7 in Calauan, Laguna, Philippines during the aftermath of the 2009 typhoon Ketsana, and endeavors to inform institutional policies to strengthen families’ disaster resilience.Design/methodology/approachPurposive sampling was applied in choosing the 20 participating families for the case study of Site III, Southville 7 – a relocation site housing more than 3,000 displaced families from Metro Manila during typhoon Ketsana. Data gathering methods such as semistructured interviews and personal observations were used during fieldwork, the findings of which were coded to reveal the study’s analytical themes.FindingsResearch findings reveal that the impacts of postdisaster relocation to family dynamics could be classified into seven broad categories: family composition and structure; members’ roles; parenting; parents’ marital relationship; familial relationship; family member’s personalities; and death and disabilities. The interplay between these impacts results in either stronger overall family cohesion or further relational ruptures.Originality/valueBy spotlighting the impacts of disasters on overall family dynamics in the context of postdisaster relocation, this study seeks to elevate the place of the family in the DRR and disaster resilience discourse.

Climate migration, resilience and adaptation in the Anthropocene: Insights from the migrating Frafra to Southern Ghana

Climate-induced indigenous migration has become a radical adaptation vision in the Anthropocene. The article focuses on the problematic of representation of indigenous traditional knowledge and imagination in the Anthropocene, in Frafra ethnic group especially. The article does so by critically examining how indigenous traditional knowledge politicise anthropogenic climate change and migration conceived as a struggle between regimes of governing. It analyses alternative approaches to adaptation and resilience, from the Western scientific knowledge and modernist ontologies, often relying on the engagement of local communities, actively produced through the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality, understood as a relational outcome and contingent relation. I argue that indigenous traditional knowledge approaches to resilience and adaptation in the Anthropocene disrupt, contest and subvert modernist discourses of climate-induced migration. It is suggested that contemporary discourses of resilience and adaptation appear to be drawing to a close as it lacks an adequate agential, transformative and also opening up alternative possibilities.

Facing Adversity Together: Toward a Genre of Organization- Stakeholder Resilience Discourse

Organizations, such as universities, face a variety of adversities, challenges, or disruptions that call for resilience to be enacted. Resilience is an important communicative process that relies on organizations and their stakeholders to collaboratively make sense of and respond to a given adversity, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to identify the shared characteristics that organizations use in their communication surrounding adversity, we completed a genre analysis of the messages created by Big 10 Universities to welcome stakeholders to the 2020–2021 academic year. Through our analysis we uncovered commonalities that make organization-stakeholder resilience discourse distinct—(1) defining a shared relationship, (2) detailing steps to regain a sense of normalcy, and (3) describing the outcome of enacting resilience. Based on these findings, we propose a genre of organization-stakeholder resilience by highlighting the role of communication in cultivating resilience through the emphasis on discursive relationships that exist between organizations and stakeholders.