Should we redefine what it means to be ‘resilient’?

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In the wake of recent upsetting world events, Dr Peter Rogers from the Department of Sociology examines what it means to ‘be resilient’, and whether our understanding of resilience should change.


“In the wake of recent terror-related events, there are increased calls for greater resilience against terror. There are media celebrations of the resilience of the public as well as heartening stories of individual valour in the face of both terrorism and disasters of other kinds – from bushfire to chemical spill to civil unrest. However, there is not often much consensus on what being resilient actually means, of what it looks like, or of how it can best be achieved.

Simply being more ‘resilient’ is not a solution to the problem of terror, nor is it a new form of security. People can be resilient in many different ways and it can be both active and passive – from being willing to give to charity or help a neighbour to knowing local evacuation routes or having the right insurance for the prevailing risks specific to your locale. A city can be resilient – in its streets, spaces, infrastructure, and design; from bomb proof glass in bus shelters to system redundancies in the power grid. An organisation or an economy can be resilient in its capacity to respond and flex under the pressures of global competition. Systems can be as complex as an individual person can, but both can be or become more and less resilient.

Resilience is perhaps best thought of as a way of living enmeshed in collaborative networks and acted out by everyone, from the people on the street to the heads of state. It is designed to allow all involved to get not just ‘back to normal’ but become better off than they were before being exposed to danger.

At its heart, resilience is a strategy of flexibility. It evokes the elastic, the bouncing back, but more than that resilience is a way of becoming more than we were before, of learning from experience, adapting and even transforming to better fit the new context into which we emerge.

Resilience is not to be thought of as a political gambit. It is not a one-shot-cure nor ‘old wine in new skin’. It represents a legitimate means for creating more participatory forms of government for the future.

What remains to be seen is if we as individuals, communities, and nations can rise to the challenge of doing things differently in the years to come, for if we are to become more resilient one thing is certain: we must change.”

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  1. Social resilience
    The first time I saw the term social resilience was in the book Super Better, written by Jane McGonigal. According to her, this type of resilience defines the “ability to get support from family, friends or partners when you need it.”

    The fact is that when we have the ability to get support from other people, the likelihood of success tends to increase. It’s like I always say, alone you can get faster, but accompanied you will go further! And true success is embedded in longevity, that is, how long will you be able to keep it!

    Now that you have understood what social resilience is, learn three ways to develop that ability in pursuit of success.

  2. I come to this conversation from an Indigenous perspective, so resilience is critical at the levels of Country, community, family, and the individual as resistance against continuing colonization strategies and practices. Colonization of our thinking privileges human-centric paradigms rather than fostering sustainable multi-species relationships, where humans are embedded within, not above, a web of interrelationships. From an Indigenous perspective our resilience is totally woven within reciprocity as custodial obligation to caring for Country. As we are within ‘Country’ and not separated from it, Country cares for us to the extent we care for it. Humanistic and Cartesian mentalities that privilege certain knowledge practices such as objectification undermines the systemic well-being of the planet/Gaia. As such the Academy needs to open itself to other ways of knowing, doing and being for its own resilience as a knowledge-system. Walking with, rather than walking over – surely at the heart of the matter? Just thinking….

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