Relational Resiliences

About the symposium

The notion of resilience, originally a descriptive concept in the study of ecosystems, has proven to be a particularly mobile concept. Taken up in fields and practices as diverse as public administration, social work and urban policy, environmental policy and practice, and health care, it has a storied social life, with professionals, practitioners, and policy-makers mobilizing it in institutional as well as broader political agendas. This has also made resilience a highly contested notion. Some commentators are critical of the concept, suggesting that it represents an intensification of existing neoliberal subjectifications and arrangements, responsibilizing individuals or communities to ‘bounce back’ from preventable social stressors such as unemployment or marginalization. Others however, while recognizing this critique, have sought to tease out possibilities for resistance and agency in the notion of resilience, emphasizing the politically affirmative potential of the metaphor.

However, while such approaches to resilience have helpfully drawn out its political uses (and misuses), in this symposium, we seek to move beyond either celebration or dismissal by examining its operation in practices. Emphasizing the way resilience is imagined, enacted, and relationally constituted in a highly diverse set of practices and fields, this symposium aims to examine empirically how resilience is taken up. What does resilience do, and how? And what is made of resilience in turn? In so doing, this symposium conceptualizes the multiple character of resilience, situates different articulations of resilience in specific practices, and highlights the notion’s social life in empirical detail.

For whom

Relational Resiliencies is an interdisciplinary exploration of the way the notion of resilience is currently reshaping institutional, governmental, environmental, as well as professional practices. Bringing together insights from a diversity of fields, including ecology, social work, radicalization studies, environmental humanities, science and technology studies and urban studies, this symposium will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience of students and academics, as well as professionals working within these sites.

Symposium program

About the organizers

Irene van Oorschot is a senior lecturer at Erasmus University College and a fellow at the Erasmus Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences ECLAS. She recently published The Law Multiple: Judgment and Knowledge in Practice (Cambridge University Press). As a Marie Curie Skłodowska Fellow she is soon to commence the three-year research project FosResil, during which she will ethnographically examine how environmental management professionals foster environmental resilience in practice at the Life Science and Society Lab at the KU Leuven.

Lieke Wissink is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Applied Sciences, Inholland, at the lectorate Youth and Society. Her current project, Relations of resilience in times of crisis among marginalized youth, is funded by NWO as part of the NWA-route Towards Resilient Societies. She also currently teaches at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Sciences, University of Amsterdam.