Resilience Discourse Research Articles

Family Resilience of Jama'ah Tabligh: Implementation Study of the Dimensions of Legality, Household Wholeness and Gender Partnerships

In recent times, family resilience discourse has become a serious concern of the government, members of parliament and observers of Islamic family law in Indonesia. The higher the rate of divorce that occurs in the community, is a form of weak and fragile family defense joints. This paper will examine the implementation of the family resilience of the Jama'ah Tabligh in Serdang Bedagai Regency in the dimensions of legality, household integrity and gender partnership. Then, this paper will also elaborate on the influence of Jama'ah Tabligh activities in the formation of family resilience among Jama'ah. This research is empirical juridical research using the approach of legal sociology and legal anthropology. Research data is analyzed using qualitative methods. Primary data sources are obtained from in-depth interview results from selected respondents using the snowball method. The results showed that the implementation of the family resilience of the Jama'ah Tabligh in Serdang Bedagai Regency in the dimensions of legality, household integrity and gender partnership was well implemented and indicated strong and resilient family resilience. This is evidenced by the high percentage of family fulfillment of respondents in the ownership of marriage certificates, child birth certificates, togetherness in the family, spousal partnerships, financial management openness and family decision-making. Jama'ah Tabligh activities greatly affect the formation of family resilience along with the stronger family members in practicing religious values both personally and together. The results of this study can be a consideration for national policy holders in realizing family resilience nationally.

Resilience as the policing of critique: A pragmatist way forward

AbstractThis article offers a critical review of the main conceptual readings of resilience as a prominent policy paradigm in international development, security, and disaster management. Focusing on neoliberal, biopolitical, cybernetic, and postliberal understandings, it probes the possibilities for engaging in a socially transformative critique of resilience. In particular, the article asks how the resilience discourse polices critique in a way that includes certain forms of knowledge, such as indigenous, local, and everyday knowledge, while excluding abstract theorising. What is considered authoritative knowledge in the resilience discourse? And what are the possibilities for opposing resilience if it ‘metabolizes critique into its internal dynamic’, as Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper famously argued? How does critique turn from a tool to undermine dominant knowledge-power regimes into a motor of governance? The article demonstrates that the more seriously we engage with the underlying ontology of resilience, the more difficult it becomes to formulate a critique that is not incorporated into governance. As a possible way forward, the article discusses Luc Boltanski's pragmatist sociology of critique.

Does urban agriculture lead to gentrification?

Urban agriculture, experiencing a resurgence across the Global North, features prominently in food system sustainability and urban resilience discourse, planning, and policy. Research, however, indicates that racialized gentrification tends to accompany urban agriculture, similar to a phenomenon documented with other green space. This study used remote sensing to map home (N = 478) and community (N = 130) gardens across Detroit, an emblematic legacy city undergoing significant redevelopment. Despite being a city in which seventy-eight percent of the residents are Black, spatial regression revealed that gardens in Detroit are actually more prevalent in non-Black-neighborhoods. Community gardens predominate in neighborhoods where residents are younger, wealthier, and college-educated, while home gardens are more numerous in areas with high rates of home ownership. Modeling also indicated that gardens are in areas with limited access to fresh produce. Contrary to the literature, we did not find a correlation between the presence of gardens and potential gentrification. Gardens, however, are consistently more prevalent in neighborhoods that have stabilized after experiencing high rates of vacancy, foreclosure, and housing demolition. These results have three important implications. First, redevelopment processes in legacy cities such as Detroit, through urban agriculture and other green infrastructure, are likely to lead to garden distributions different than those found in cities with more typical development trajectories. Second, the research calls into question generalized assumptions that expanding green space inevitably leads to gentrification, necessitating deeper investigation of these dynamics in diverse urban settings. And finally, racialized narratives around gardens and redevelopment risk undermining long-standing connections between Detroit’s gardens and environmental justice.

A modeler’s guide to studying the resilience of social-technical-environmental systems

The term ‘resilience’ is increasingly being used in Earth system science and other disciplines which study what could be called ‘social-technical-environmental systems’—systems composed of closely interacting social (e.g. economic and political), technical (e.g. energy production infrastructure), and environmental components (e.g. climate and the biosphere). However, the diversity of resilience theories and a certain (intended) openness of proposed definitions can lead to misunderstandings and may impede their application to complex systems modelling. We propose a guideline that aims to ease communication as well as to support systematic development of research questions and models in the context of resilience. It can be applied independently of the modelling framework or underlying theory of choice. At the heart of this guideline is a checklist consisting of four questions to be answered: (1) Resilience of what? (2) Resilience regarding what? (3) Resilience against what? (4) Resilience how? We refer to the answers to these resilience questions as the ‘system’, the ‘sustainant’, the ‘adverse influence’, and the ‘response options’. The term ‘sustainant’ is a neologism describing the feature of the system (state, structure, function, pathway, …) that should be maintained (or restored quickly enough) in order to call the system resilient. The use of this proposed guideline in the field of Earth system resilience is demonstrated for the application example of a potential climate tipping element: the Amazon rainforest. The example illustrates the diversity of possible answers to the checklist’s questions as well as their benefits in structuring the modelling process. The guideline supports the modeler in communicating precisely what is actually meant by ‘resilience’ in a specific context. This combination of freedom and precision could help to advance the resilience discourse by building a bridge between those demanding unambiguous definitions and those stressing the benefits of generality and flexibility of the resilience concept.

The Discourse of the Resilience of Hospitals in the Theoretical Context of the Organisation’s Concept of Resilience and Factors

The Discourse of the Resilience of Hospitals in the Theoretical Context of the Organisation’s Concept of Resilience and Factors

Promising resilience: Systems and survival after forestry's ends

AbstractEcologists, social scientists, and policymakers alike define “resilience” as the properties that allow complex systems to function in the wake of sudden shocks. While proponents treat these properties as empirical qualities that can be engineered into existence, critics have largely treated government‐organized attempts to do so as consistent with the dismantling of the welfare state. This article offers an ethnographic account of a conservation policy initiative in northwest British Columbia designed to generate consensus‐based quantitative indicators on salmon health. I examine how workshop organizers, emboldened by provocative metaphors of survival and systematicity, mobilize resilience discourse as a platform for social analysis, and urge other researchers to envision how their own work might allow them to transcend institutional attachments altogether. Resilience‐based initiatives have wrought profound changes in experts’ everyday lives, in part by encouraging precariously employed researchers to reimagine their relationships to shrinking government institutions. In addition to naming an emergent political logic for legitimating downsizing and other organizational responses to disasters, I argue that resilience discourse provides the experts entrusted with designing these responses with new grammars for imagining the future viability of their own expertise.

The native body as blue ground: South Africa’s infrastructural production of race

ABSTRACT South African municipalities increasingly celebrate prepaid water and electricity meters for enabling them to build more resilient cities. This framing has been critiqued for its neoliberal underpinnings, where the discourse of resilience masks the reality that people are being coerced into surviving with consistently diminishing resources. While these infrastructures undeniably materialise neoliberal logics, this paper considers the labour compounds of nineteenth-century Kimberley to suggest such infrastructures also have a racialising function with a much older lineage. The Kimberley compounds were designed and managed by various technical experts tasked with maximising productivity and balancing economic constraints with mortality rates. In so doing, they relied upon and produced racialised theories of the body. Where the experts framed their work as turning on the observation of “the native races,” in fact those experts were producing the very racial truths they claimed only to uncover. The compound, most often studied as an infrastructure of racial domination, has rarely been recognised as productive of emergent notions of “race.” Read through this lineage, continued infrastructural coercion in contemporary South Africa, which relies on the techno-racial expertise developed in earlier eras, reveals itself as critical to race’s continual reproduction.

Examining relational social ontologies of disaster resilience: lived experiences from India, Indonesia, Nepal, Chile and Andean territories

PurposeThe neoliberal resilience discourse and its critiques both contribute to its hegemony, obscuring alternative discourses in the context of risk and uncertainties. Drawing from the “ontology of potentiality”, the authors suggest reclaiming “resilience” through situated accounts of the connected and relational every day from the global south. To explore alternate possibilities, the authors draw attention to the social ontology of disaster resilience that foregrounds relationality, intersectionality and situated knowledge.Design/methodology/approachQuilting together the field work experiences in India, Indonesia, Nepal, Chile and Andean territories, the authors interrogate the social ontologies and politics of resilience in disaster studies in these contexts through six vignettes. Quilting, as a research methodology, weaves together various individual fragments involving their specific materialities, situated knowledge, layered temporalities, affects and memories. The authors’ six vignettes discuss the use, politicisation and resistance to resilience in the aftermath of disasters.FindingsWhile the pieces do not try to bring out a single “truth”, the authors argue that firstly, the vignettes provide non-Western conceptualisations of resilience, and attempts to provincialise externally imposed notions of resilience. Secondly, they draw attention to social ontology of resilience as the examples underscores the intersubjectivity of disaster experiences, the relational reaching out to communities and significant others.Originality/valueDrawing from in-depth research conducted in six disaster contexts by seven scholars from South Asia, South America and Northern Europe, the authors embrace pluralist situated knowledge, and cross-cultural/language co-authoring. Thus, the co-authored piece contributes to diversifying disaster studies scholarship methodologically.

Towards representative resilience: the power of culture to foster local resource representation

ABSTRACT Community resilience policies continue to grow in popularity as a strategy to prepare for the local impact of forecasted environmental uncertainty, however, criticisms of community resilience discourse remain. This paper takes forward these criticisms, specifically addressing the issue of representative power over key natural resources, using Gaventa’s [Gaventa, J. 2006. “Finding the Spaces for Change: A Power Analysis.” IDS Bulletin 37 (6): 23–33] power cube as a conceptual framework to examine power relations. Our objective is to advance current critical community resilience literature from acknowledging local power relations as a component of any community resilience strategy to situating the devolvement of representative power over key natural resources as a mandatory pre-requisite before any community can be considered "resilient". The paper adopts a case study approach and draws on a grassroots-led resilience project in the Scottish Highlands that utilises traditional land practices and local cultural history to educate people on land sustainability. We explore the potential of the project to construct deeper cultural and historical understandings of local environments and whether projects like these can serve an additional purpose of motivating people to pursue greater influence in land decisions. The analysis reveals emerging links between power, culture and land representation that could foster new forms of local resilience. However, perceptions of systemic barriers such as insecure land tenancies and democratic deficits stymied the potential of this raised motivation. As normative community resilience strategies continue to devolve responsibility over resources without devolving power, a new resilient settlement is required to confront an environmentally uncertain future.

Resilienz durch Muße? Ethnografische Befunde zu einer ambivalenten Relation

Resilience has recently become an expansive concept in political, economic and scientific fields. The normative and ideological dimensions underlying this concept and the resulting cultural effects have hardly been the subject of empirically grounded research in cultural studies so far, although resilience discourses have long been materialising in everyday and living environments. Using the example of courses that promise actors a life with more leisure, this article asks how ideas of resilience are communicated, made plausible and also critically negotiated in this specific field. To what extent is the increased attractiveness of the concept of leisure as a specific form of the qualification of temporal experience related to ideas of a resilient self? How are ideas of a fundamentally deficient self in need of optimisation expressed here and for which social problems are what kind of solutions being sought? The article assumes that both the concept of leisure and the concept of resilience co-create, on a discursive level, the problems, challenges and crises to which they respond.

The Relationship between Intangible Cultural Heritage and Urban Resilience: A Systematic Literature Review

The need to study and understand urban resilience has been defended by academics, justified by a new global context characterized by a growing urban population and a changing climate. Moreover, the importance of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) has been recognized by UNESCO since 2003. Nevertheless, the relationship between ICH and urban resilience discourses is recent, with academic studies on this topic seeing an exponential growth from 2017 onward. This article aims to develop a systematic literature review in order to answer the research question “how does intangible heritage relate to urban resilience?” and present current academic debates on this relationship. Following a methodology which entailed an academic database search and the application of exclusion criteria, 94 results from Scopus and Web of Science were retrieved and analysed. The article presents a discussion of results and showcases an existing linkage between both areas of study. This study demonstrates the fragmentation and diversity of the debates when addressing the relationship between the two topics, with an existing focus on sustainability discourses, built heritage and the role of local communities. Moreover, the article also shows a prevalence of discourses based on an engineering resilience approach. Considerations for future approaches to ICH and urban resilience are presented, namely, the need to better integrate ICH into urban resilience discourses.

A social theory of resilience: The governance of vulnerability in crisis-era neoliberalism

ABSTRACT In this paper, we set out a critical realist-informed Marxist approach to resilience, the principal argument being that the discourse is best explicated through a theoretical lens which situates its rise in the context of a neoliberal order which is undergoing a global organic crisis. Our key contribution to the literature is to show not only that extant resilience discourses ontologise vulnerability and thereby strip political discourse of the language of social struggle, but also that they provide a crisis-recovery imaginary more congenial to the interests of capital and state than to the vulnerable populations they ostensibly aim to capacitate. We conclude by joining a chorus of other scholars committed to exposing resilience as an insidious technology of the self.

Resilience in the Times of COVID-19: Rethinking the Neoliberal Paradigm and Creating New Strategies for Battling the Global Change

The paper is an attempt to redefine the concept of resilience in the context of changes taking place globally. One of the key changes was caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. It has shown the inadequacy of the neoliberal discourse of resilience that shifts responsibility to individuals who must be prepared to overcome the circumstances of crisis or shock. However, resilience can be seen in terms of solidarity, dignity and responsibility towards others. Resilience also implies strategies that involve large investments in public health, ecology and self-sustainable solutions to battle climate change that is causing infectious diseases. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness of the need to start creating a set of public policies that would imply an ethical evaluation related to the success or failure of treating others responsibly.

Parenting an adolescent with complex regional pain syndrome: A dyadic qualitative investigation of resilience.

Adolescent chronic pain exists within a social context, affecting the lives of adolescents, parents, peers, and wider family members. Typically, parental research has focussed on the negative impact on parents associated with parenting an adolescent with chronic pain. However, a small number of studies have identified positive parental outcomes and functioning, with a focus on parental resilience. This study sought to extend existing knowledge by providing a detailed and contextualized understanding of how parental dyads experience and demonstrate resilience in response to parenting an adolescent with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) and the meaning that parents ascribe to these shared experiences. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was used to conduct an in-depth qualitative interview study of parents of an adolescent with CRPS. Semi-structured interviews were conducted via Skype with eight mother-father parental dyads of an adolescent aged 11-25 years with CRPS. A single prominent theme 'masking reality in the face of pain' dominated the parental discourse and experience of resilience. Resilience was experienced as an incongruence between private distress and the perceived obligation to display socially desirable resilience behaviours to protect their child from their own distress. Study findings highlight the benefits of strength-based interventions to enhance parental resilience. This is particularly important since parental behaviours have been shown to influence child pain outcomes. Future research should seek to explore resilience in different populations such as lone parents, siblings, and those parenting an adolescent with pain conditions other than CRPS.

Child polyvictimization in Zongo communities in Ghana: Young people’s reflections on systemic resilience enablers

PurposePolyvictimization is often commonplace for young people living in violent communities. The situation is no different for young people in Ghanaian Zongo communities where poverty, social disorder and social vices are prevalent due to structural reasons. ObjectiveUsing the social ecology approach to resilience, the study sought the perspectives of young people about how systemic aspects of community contribute to their positive development in high-risk communities. MethodsFollowing the short narrative approach, 23 young people ages 18–24 from two Zongo communities in Ghana were engaged in qualitative interviews. FindingsCultural values of solidarity and peer support were common systemic enablers that facilitated young peoples’ resilience. These enablers provided context and resources which ensured their survival in cases of neglect and abuse. Cultural values of solidarity exemplified by care for each other among residents created a safe environment and cultural capital contributed to the young peoples’ resilience. Additionally, the “base” within Zongo communities provided a social structure that enabled peer support and promoted young peoples’ resilience in the face of polyvictimization experiences. Conclusion and implicationsThe findings shift the resilience discourse from a conception of personality traits to one of collective aspects of community systems. They also identify cultural values of solidarity within the community that provide cultural capital for the social functioning of young people dealing with polyvictimization in high-risk environments. The findings provide pathways for professionals to promote resilience and develop resilience-oriented primary preventive measures for adolescents living in high-risk environments in Africa.

Framing Migrant Resilience as a Civic Responsibility: A Case Study of Municipal and Provincial Immigrant Integration Policies in Toronto, Ontario

Abstract This article presents a case study of how regional and municipal governments in Toronto, Ontario, use the concept of resilience to frame the challenges faced by immigrants and the steps governments are taking to promote immigrant integration. In the past decade, resilience has emerged as a policy framework to encourage positive adaptation of people and institutions that are facing social, economic and environmental challenges associated with population growth and economic globalisation. As a policy discourse, the concept of resilience is used to identify which immigrants need social and psychological support to better cope with pre- and post-migration stressors. Although government discourse acknowledges some of the structural inequities migrants face that require resilience (e.g. poverty, systemic racism, precarious employment), the discourse on migrant resilience notably omits government responsibility to enact structural solutions. Even the City of Toronto’s anti-racism campaign, which seeks to reduce racial bias and discrimination against immigrants, frames ‘civic resilience’ as an individual responsibility. Despite the promise of resilience to emphasise immigrants’ capabilities, we argue that resilience discourse operates as a type of diversity management strategy to identify which immigrants warrant government support to maximise their economic contributions to the region.

Voting for Your Pocketbook, but against Your Pocketbook? A Study of Brexit at the Local Level

In explaining the outcome of the 2016 EU referendum in the United Kingdom, can theories emphasizing the importance of economic factors be reconciled with the fact that many people appeared to vote against their economic self-interest? This article approaches this puzzle through case study research that draws on fieldwork and a process of reciprocal knowledge exchange with local communities in five local authorities in England and Wales. It argues that the Leave vote can be attributed partly to political discontent associated with trajectories of relative economic decline and deindustrialization. Building on the growing literature about the role of narratives and discourses in navigating uncertainty, it contends that these localized economic experiences, interpreted through local-level narratives, paved the way for local-level discourses of resilience and nationwide optimistic messaging about the economic impacts of Brexit to resonate. Local and national-level discourses discounting the potential economic costs of leaving the European Union played a crucial role in giving precise, somewhat paradoxical, political content to the sense of discontent. The article contributes to the growing focus on place and community in understanding political behavior and invites further research on local discourses linking macro-level trajectories and micro-level voting decisions.

Unmasking resilience as governmentality: towards an Afrocentric epistemology

This paper is a discussion of how indigenous Afrocentric epistemologies proffer critiques and alternative to neoliberal discourses of resilience and what differences it makes for the study of International Politics. There has been an epistemological shift in recent times towards resilience as a form of governance aimed at enhancing the agency and adaptive capacity of populations. This has necessitated the mainstreaming and theorisation of local systems of ontology. Importantly, the current emphasis privileges how societies absorb and manage natural exigencies of life. The underlying assumption of this shift in the contemporary critical and policy discourse is that indigenous forms of ‘‘knowledge’’ and indigeneity can enhance the ability of local actors to navigate the uncertainties of a globalised world. I question this assumption by highlighting the fact that the apparent epistemological interest in local ontology is a crisis resolution strategy that has become necessary after the universal neoliberal project faced crisis and rejection. Given this, the promotion of resilience epistemology is meant to extend the reach of global actors into the deep recesses of peripheral systems and to instruct how resistance can be reduced. This makes resilience a technology or strategy of governmentality, a new emerging form of governance agenda. Given that the globalisation crisis for neoliberalism has not abated, the only insurance of Africa will be to formalise and own its ontology of resilience strategies to insulate its populations from external pressures of disruption.

A Study on the Integration of Resilience and Smart City Concepts in Urban Systems

The continuous growth of cities brings out various concerns for improved development and management of the multifaceted urban systems, including those of resilience and smartness. Despite the many significant efforts in the research field, both notions remain changeable, thus retaining the lack of commonly accepted conceptual and terminological frameworks. The paper’s research goals are to designate the current direct and indirect links in the conceptualizations and research trends of the resilience and smart city frameworks and to prove the potential of the conceptual convergence between them in the context of urban systems. The application of a semi-systematic literature review, including bibliometric evidence and followed by content analysis, has led to the observation that as the resilience discourse opens up to embrace other dimensions, including technology, the smart city research turns its interest to the perspective of urban protection. Therefore, both concepts share the goal for urban sustainability realized through specific capacities and processes and operationalized with the deployment of technology. The paper’s findings suggest that the conceptual and operational foundations of these two concepts could support the emergence of an integrated framework. Such a prospect acknowledges the instrumental role of the smart city approach in the pursuit of urban resilience and unfolds a new model for sustainable city management and development.

Harmful Speech and the COVID-19 Penumbra

There has been a disturbing rise in harmful speech during COVID-19. Many have been shocked by the deluge of malign information, which has disseminated widely and rapidly on account of technological advancement, globalization, and digital interconnectivity. But we should not have been surprised. The historical record reveals that pandemics inevitably lead to an increase in false information and hate speech. This paper makes two central claims. First, the themes of disinformation have remained remarkably consistent across pandemics. We illustrate this through an examination of harmful speech that has spread during three prior pandemics and the current pandemic. COVID-19 is unique only in the ease with which disinformation has spread, amplified, and reverberated over the internet. Second, we argue that COVID-19 presents a unique and valuable opportunity to tackle online disinformation. We highlight three promising avenues for combating harmful online speech that have emerged during COVID-19 and suggest avenues for further inquiry. In so doing, we seek to inspire a discourse of resilience. Technology presents both the problem and the solution; through emphasis on effective measures at combating online harms, we can heed the lessons of the past and provide for a better future and a safer online environment.