Resilience and the Humanities: Critique and Testing

Explores the concept of 'resilience' by proposing that it is a contested idea, susceptible to criticism, and not a predetermined notion whose consequences are fixed.


"Resilience" is all around us. It is a buzzword in domains that range from engineering, through moral psychology, coaching and self-help manuals, to military strategy. The word has varied meaning across these fields, but all definitions share the idea that it accounts for the protection and maintenance of different environments through the adaptation of its individuals to the changes or disruptions these might undergo. The apparently obvious meaning of resilience and its normative consequences are the result of a series of intellectual, social and epistemic processes. Resilience and the Humanities: Critique and Testing proposes that, regardless of its ubiquity, resilience is a concept that cannot be accepted without interrogating and testing its value, thereby contesting and critiquing it.

This edited volume explores the possibilities and shortcomings of the concept through philosophy, literature, history and film studies in fifteen chapters that seek to understand the promises and limitations of resilience through different case studies. The authors discuss the way the concept fills a discourse with ideas that have consequences upon subjects and bodies on a social, cultural and political level.

An overall view of these different approaches to resilience allows this collection to establish the multivocal nature of the concept when used in different disciplines. Put simply, there is a multiplicity of ways in which the concept of resilience can be applied across the humanities.

Produced in collaboration with the University of Rochester Humanities Center.

This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

STEPHEN M. HART is Professor of Latin American Film, Literature and Culture at University College London, UK.

CAMILA GATICA MIZALA is an Assistant Professor at Universidad de Chile's Department of Historical Sciences.

NICOLAS LEMA HABASH is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota.

CARLOS FONSECA is Assistant Professor and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge.