Increasingly, over the past months starting in May 2015 at a Rockefeller Foundation Think Tank Session in Bellagio on ‘Redefining Resiliency and Ageing’, I found resilience and the manner in which it is conceptualized and generally used provocative.
The use of resilience as a concept is muddled with an array of widely diffuse (mis)understandings, ranging from the happiness and subjective well-being of positive psychology through to the politics of disaster resilience and issues pertaining to climate change. Although, on an individual level, resilience is associated with attributes such as positive relationships and social support, a relationship merely characterized as resilient does indeed not sound particularly attractive; to describe grandmothers caring for their HIV/AIDS infected / affected children and grandchildren in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as resilient (which they indeed are) could give policy makers the justification to negate the full extent and depth of the pressures these carers are experiencing – barely surviving – with dire consequences for appropriate policy and programmatic interventions. Pamela Irwin examines resiliency at the environment / relational / person nexus in her recently completed thesis on resilience and single older women in Australia. Her main finding is that the cohort of older women was boxed in by the deeply ingrained rural and historical stereotypes of them as the resilient ‘Aussie battlers’ with the result that they just pragmatically had to accept their current (not always favourable) situations – ‘keep calm and carry on’. The younger, more vulnerable group who on face-value didn’t adhere to the local idea of resilience were boxed out from actively participating and contributing to the community. This work by Irwin contradicts the prevailing literature where resilience is widely portrayed as a positive and agentic concept.
In critiquing the role of resilience in austerity politics Kristina Diprose might push it to the extreme by titling her paper ‘Resilience is futile’. However, her core argument that the cultivation of resilience is not necessarily the answer to our social and economic ills is especially salient for the marginalized groups mentioned – the grandmothers heading HIV/AIDS affected multi-generational households in SSA and these single older women in the Australian outback. Diprose (2015: 48–54) argues that the call to / label of resilience often implies resignation to one’s fate in four ways, namely putting up with precarity, instilling continuous inequality, relocating responsibility to the individual / community, and deferring demands for change to another day.
These assertions provoke further questions, including:
- When could resilience then be seen as a positive trait and when is it merely all about basic survival mode – determined by whom? Is mere survival (‘hanging in’) still seen as resilience?
- What is the relation between individual and community resilience thresholds?
- Does the concept allow individuals / communities to voice their concerns / struggles / needs / vulnerabilities?
- What role does the specific historical and cultural identity of a locality play in determining community resilience?
- Should resilience be seen as an end point of a trajectory or the departure point for possible interventions towards flourishing?
- If so, when does resilience move towards flourishing?
It seems that the elusive and emerging conceptualization of resilience should be differentially contextualized and negotiated for diverse audiences.
About the Author:
Dr Jaco Hoffman is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. He researches intergenerational dynamics and co-ordinates the African Research Network on Ageing (AFRAN) and the Society and Environment Research Cluster.
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