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 across such disparate domains as engineering, moral psychology, coaching, self-help, and military strategy. The word has varied meaning across these fields, but all definitions share the idea that it denotes the protection and maintenance of particular environments through adaptation 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 using 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 are multiple ways in which the concept of resilience can be applied across the humanities.

Funded by the Humanities Center at the University of Rochester, NY.
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.