CfP Research Workshop
‘Changing Resilience: Alternative Vocabularies’
Monday 4 September 2023 University of Stirling, UK
In person & online
A collaborative research workshop to think through multilingual critical alternatives, from the post/de-colonial arts & humanities, to the all-pervasive discourse of ‘resilience’ and ‘crisis’.
Janet Roitman (2014) has argued extensively that the stakes of ‘crisis’ discourse affect individual political subjectivity, collective action, and the visibility of the vulnerable. Covid-19 has intensified the attention paid to resilience around the globe. Similarly, discourses surrounding the responses to what is framed in the language of ‘crisis’ need to be examined within their colonial legacies and specific postcolonial contexts. This workshop addresses whether in such contexts, the omnipresent terminology of resilience makes sense. That is to ask, whether resilience – as a widespread behavioural descriptor and societal target – is useful for framing life in and around postcolonial ‘crisis’.
Resilience discourse perpetuates core assumptions of Eurocentric or Western thinking, particularly around notions of individual autonomy and regularity in space and time. “Western policies of resilience,” Chandler (2021) writes, “understood as automated adaptation to the world, close off and are antithetical to” understandings of communities as relationally open (after Glissant) and communities as situated in and amongst a world of flux and flows. At the same time, today’s incessant recourse to resilience discourse is incontestably Eurocentric in both of its disciplinary origins: on the one hand, applications of systemic resilience stem from ecology, and on the other, individual resilience is based on psychology (Moser et al 2019). The co-option of this analytical framework by institutions from a small scale up to national governments has seen a pressurizing of the individual subject or group to be uninfringeable and efficient in the face of struggle. The myth of the empowered individual (Harvey) then has pervasive effects on ways of thinking and living. This neoliberal framing threatens to romanticize community strategies for coping at the edge of crisis, whilst promoting self-responsibility as self-determination and empowerment in a strength-based lexicon which overlooks ongoing systemic injustice and oppression and remains fixed in a teleological understanding of time (Amo-Agyemang 2021). The term’s colonial heritage emerges in ongoing ‘interventions’ within the fields of development, economics, and international policy around disaster response, but also entraps ‘vulnerable’ communities when they are characterized as especially adapted to coping with rapid change. In this light, resilience also resonates with the colonial myth of progress and its closing of imagined futures.
This research workshop will examine the stakes of this discourse from a multilingual arts and humanities perspective. It will foreground questions of (un)translatability within the production of conceptual tools. With a view to building alternative vocabularies of resilience that move beyond its colonial undertones, it will initiate an interrogation of culturally specific forms of response and explore the semantic, cultural, and political specificities of terms surrounding ‘resilience’ and ‘crisis’ from the perspective of multiple languages.
Assuming the ineluctable link between language and life worlds, the workshop will start to formulate a robust, dynamic critical vocabulary for theorising ‘resilience’ and ‘crisis’. It will rely on specific case studies presented to counter the shortcomings and occlusions of existent terminology (for example, débrouillardise in Senegalese film, bigidi in gwo-ka dance, and kòbòlò in fiction from Accra). This will lead to an edited volume of an initial collection of multilingual terms that stands as a creative intervention to serve intellectual endeavours of scholars working across languages. It will add to the conversation occurring in the decolonial arts and humanities, opening up space for reimagining concept-geography beyond the monolingual dominance of English.
The workshop is part of a broader British Academy funded project (SRG22\220940) that interrogates the meanings and circulations of resilience discourse transnationally and in multiple public domains.
Paper proposals of roughly 300 words accompanied by a short biography should be sent to hannah.grayson@stir.ac.uk by April 28th 2023. Proposals should include a specific notion or word, as well as the case study that will be used to explore the proposed term. Papers are invited in English, French and Spanish, the word itself in any language. We want to encourage an “English-last” approach within the feasible, so if you wish to present in any other language please get in contact. There is some resource available for translation.
Terms to think around: ‘resilience’; ‘crisis’; ‘time’; ‘recovery’; ‘vulnerability; ‘adaptability’; ‘agency’.
CfP available in French & Spanish – please email.