Abstract
Resilience is the popular term for a capacity to ‘bounce back’ from adversity. It is also a scientific concept informing an influential bio-psychological approach to contemporary inequality. This article recalls the origins of the term in developmental psychopathology and suggests that the project of cultivating resilient selves is an aspect of the broader depoliticization characterizing “post-democracies” today. The scientific object of resilience is produced through the study of the interplay of risky and protective variables in the individual life course. Resilience is present when developmental resources in and around the self help to combat threats to ‘adaptation’. The project of resilience is to know how to cultivate individual robustness in the face of immutable threats – including poverty, grasped as a developmental risk factor. In this way of knowing the world, structured inequality is seen to be relatively unchangeable compared to the powers of resilience. Resilience has been taken up by neoliberal governments as the model of evidence-based ‘actionable knowledge’ for population interventions. But its influence extends further, to institutions of global governance, where resilience’s central object of enquiry and intervention – the child – has been projected onto humanity as a whole. The appeal of resilience as a practical and optimistic science is undeniable but we suggest that it is time to take account of its implications for political contestation. Resilience provides positive psychology’s contribution to the narrowing of justice- and equity-seeking projects in the current moment, reducing their horizons to the care for ‘human capital’ under conditions of socioeconomic precarity.
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Notes
Resilience’s model of the robust self has seemed to offer the reassuring promise of protection in the face of the privatization of risk (see Calhoun, 2006). Its optimistic note is also sounded against the popularization of trauma as a metaphor for reverberating psychic injury (see Luckhurst, 2003).
One might begin to document the abundance of resilience-focused media stories by pointing to major features in the UK’s Guardian (Bunting, 2008) and Independent (Morrison, 2007), the New York Times (Bazellon, 2006) and Time Magazine (Sullivan, 2001; Gorman et al, 2006), as well as more specialized publications like the Harvard Business Review (Coutu, 2002) and Scientific American (Stix, 2011). The US Army resilience programme to “increase the number of soldiers who derive meaning and personal growth from their combat experience” (Cornum et al, 2011) has been recommended for emulation in the Canadian Forces (Zamorski, 2010, pp. 27–28) and in business (Seligman, 2011). On the Annual Resiliency Celebration in Brooks, Alberta, see Dumont (2013). The last decade has seen the uptake and deployment of resilience in management and human resources literatures, with a focus on its relation to adaptability to change and coping in the workplace (see, for example, Wanberg and Banas, 2000; Wilson and Ferch, 2005; Youssef and Luthans, 2007; Millear et al, 2008; Grant et al, 2009). The Internet is littered with consultancies and organizations offering seminars, workshops and training programmes promising to enhance the resilience of employees. The organization of the January 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, around the hopeful theme of “resilient dynamism”, or the healing of economic wounds, is emblematic of the meeting of medical and financial logics we describe in this article (see Jenkins, 2013).
The Penn Resiliency Project, created in the early 1990s, has conducted 13 controlled trials of school-based resilience interventions, and developed a resilience-enhancing curriculum. It has spawned PRPs in the United Kingdom and Australia (www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/prpsum.htm). The Canadian-based Resilience Research Centre (www.resilienceproject.org) coordinates several large-scale international research collaborations, including the International Resilience Project, a multi-year study drawing data from 14 countries, and Pathways to Resilience, a multi-site project with partners in Canada, New Zealand, Colombia, South Africa and China. An unrelated Pathways Clinic based in Australia (www.pathwayshrc.com.au/) claims to have its programmes delivered in 20 countries. At least two provincial governments in Canada have launched major child resilience programmes. Alberta Health Service’s Bounce Back Book series distributes advice to parents and caregivers on encouraging the development of resiliency skills (www.albertahealthservices.ca/1739.asp). Ontario’s Reaching In … Reaching Out (Promoting Resilience in Young Children) programme (www.reachinginreachingout.com/index.htm) equips adults to teach resiliency skills to children. Resilience has also been taken up by and in relation to Aboriginal groups in Canada. Since the mid-1990s governmental and Aboriginal organizations have funded more than 12 community-based resilience studies through CIET Canada (Andersson and Ledogar, 2008).
Not all thematizations of resilience have to do directly with children. Resilience has an ever-widening field of circulation that stretches from child development, adolescent health, and traumatology or ‘coping’ studies, to research on sustainable development, the governance of complex social-ecological systems, even the sources of grassroots counter-hegemonic struggles. Resilience is a concept that can be deployed in relation to such dissimilar problems precisely because it is not primarily concerned with understanding the specific source of stress; rather, it is a knowledge of the ability to ‘bounce back’. It has gained particular traction in the context of arguments about the dynamism of contemporary indigenous communities following experiences of colonial subjugation and coercive assimilation. As Bell (2006) points out, in the context of struggles for decolonization, de-emphasizing the “breaks” caused by colonialism can be seen as a means of asserting indigenous “ ‘wholeness’ and continuity” (p. 258). While we are very much aware that discussions of resilience go beyond the specific object of the resilient child, and in some cases are means of imagining and asserting a collective will to survive, we think it is important to recall the specific origins of the theme in the ‘psy’ sciences of childhood and to ask how a developmental figure and its psychological frame inform the wider uses of resilience, including those which make sense of colonial history in terms of wounding and survival. What kinds of questions are left behind when developmental psychopathology is the framework for understanding the past, present and future of a collectivity? For an illustration of work taking up the possibilities of resilience as a framework for stressing collective agency see Coleman et al (2012).
Although a fuller genealogy of resilience science is beyond the scope of this article, resilience’s key question – how to explain diversity of response in relation to stressors – lines it up with a host of other disciplines in the life sciences, social sciences and humanities that turned to the production of a knowledge of human variation in the mid-twentieth century. In this shift from earlier ‘race’ studies, human variation became both an epistemic object and an epistemic tool. See the work of the Max Planck Research Group, “Twentieth Century History of Knowledges about Human Variation”, www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/NWGLipphardt. Resilience science’s contribution to the knowledge of human variability is not just about the variability of capacities to flourish; its particular tools (the longitudinal study, the randomized controlled trial) have made variability a basis for interventions.
Given the specificity of the American national mythos, it is perhaps not surprising that it was from the United States, in the main, that resilience’s good-news stories of individual overcoming were at first dispatched. In an interview, Norman Garmezy makes the connection between resilience science’s positive orientation and successive generations of immigrants’ “escape from poverty [that] is part of the American heritage” (cit. in Rolf, 1999, p. 9).
In the United States, early resilience science coincided with a number of preventative initiatives targeting what was coming to be known as the ‘culture of poverty’, manifested in adolescent delinquency, substance use, sexual activity and pregnancy. The conviction that preventative interventions could produce life-trajectory changes, especially when they enhanced IQ and general school readiness among poor children, was the basis for the national Head Start Program initiated in 1965 (see Zigler and Styfco, 2010, pp. 3–53). Under neoliberal pressures for performance measurement and accountability (laid out in the 1994 Head Start Reauthorization Act), Head Start has come to lean on one of the key tools of resilience science, the longitudinal survey: the Family and Child Experiences Survey is used to track individual outcomes in relation to performance goals (see U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, accessed 23 October 2014).
From the mid-1990s, a discourse that emerged in medicine insisting that clinical decisions be ‘evidence-based’ expanded to encompass more and more aspects of public policymaking, dictating that policy should be informed by rigorously established objective evidence. Related developments over the same period produced the exhortation to produce policy-relevant research, and an entire literature of Knowledge Translation and Exchange.
As was the case with longitudinal studies, the historical development of randomized control design is tightly bound up with the emergence of psychological forms of expertise (Dehue, 1997, p. 669; see also Boring, 1954; Winston and Blais, 1996).
The issue of generalizability remains fraught, though, because of the extremely circumscribed experimental conditions (Worrall, 2007, p. 33). The problem becomes the source of the perpetual assertion that more research is needed, and has helped to promote the rise of systematic reviews and meta analyses.
As early as 1974, Garmezy (1974) worried about the “intervention” stage of resilience studies, exemplified at the time in target-group skills-training experiments. “[T]here remains the discomforting awareness that the future environmental demands that all children must face, whatever their degree of vulnerability to psychopathology, are so great that a broader program of intervention seems necessary” (p. 95). What programme would be broad enough? Perhaps the ever-widening scope of prevention programs attests to the elusiveness of that intervention on the developing person that could produce a catch-all immunity to risk.
There are now numerous examples of such interventions, with the resultant evidence synthesized in systematic reviews (for example, Barlow and Parsons, 2007; Thomas and Zimmer Gembeck, 2007; Barlow et al, 2010). Routinely, such reviews conclude that “more stringent, experimental evaluations of early family/parent training be carried out” (Piquero et al, 2009, p. 6).
Within the merely psychosocial perspective, claims regarding the ordinariness of resilience processes were derived from the assumption that attachment is a universal process in human development. The psychobiological research reinforces the claims of resilience’s ordinariness and universality by identifying its neural circuits and molecular pathways. Using brain imaging to measure neural responses to affective stimuli, this research ascertains what it calls “the neural basis of social behaviour” (Charney, 2004, p. 384).
Murray is describing a collaboration between the Government of British Columbia and the University of British Columbia’s Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP). Along with government funding for HELP came the requirement to allocate a percentage of data surveying to Aboriginal children, specifically. Mandatory registration of voluntary participants in the resulting parent-training programmes, such as Strong Start B.C., allowed for a further basis of data collection. Murray (2014) notes that “personal information privacy rights promised in HELP’s research ethics protocol” could be suspended whenever there were concerns about threats to child welfare, a qualification that implies a legal “duty to report” keyed to “human development scientific norms” in play (n.p.).
This optimism is “cruel” in the same way as the practices informed by normative fantasy discussed in Berlant’s (2011) Cruel Optimism.
On the new expropriations of “communicative capitalism”, see Dean (2012).
For other examples of organizations retailing the principles of resilience, see The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (2011), a non-profit consultancy that provides guidance to private and public sector clients engaged in building local models of the “‘good enough’ society” after the Winnicottian model of the “good enough mother”. There is also the two-pronged approach of the Rockefeller Foundation (accessed 23 October 2014), combining the promotion of better inclusion in the global capitalist economy with resilience-training on the ground to prepare the newly-included for that economy’s “shocks and chronic stresses”. In Canada, the flagship programme of the Canada Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), an influential charity with connections to UNICEF and the World Bank, has been a Human Development Program promoting the view that poverty need not be an obstacle to healthy child development when counteracted by high-quality relationships and sensory stimulation. CIFAR-affiliated researchers created the “Early Development Instrument” (EDI), a survey that renders visible geographical concentrations of parental and community failure to equip kindergarten-age children with the traits of “school readiness” (see Murray, 2014). A tool that “shifts the focus away from inequities created within the school and wider economic systems”, the EDI has been taken up by different levels of government in Canada, the United States and Australia as an index of future human capital costs and benefits (see Einboden et al, 2013, pp. 557–558).
Human development stands in an ambiguous relation to neoliberalism, as its proponents recognize. The “Human Development (HD) approach embodies a robust paradigm, which may be contrasted with the neoliberal (NL) paradigm of the Washington consensus. There are points of overlap, but also important points of difference in objectives, assumptions, constraints and in the main areas for policy and in the indicators for assessing results” (Jolly qtd. in Fukuda-Parr, 2003, p. 302). We suggest that discrepancies between human development and growth-obsessed economic policy, however, represent not so much tensions as specializations which are congruent.
We focus on Amartya Sen because of the way that his vocabulary has been taken up by the UNDP. Nussbaum (2000) has been another disseminator of the “capabilities” concept, especially in relation to questions of human rights and gender.
Sen pointedly borrows the expression, ‘hard cases,’ from John Rawls.
The HDI bears comparison to the EDI used to measure the construct of “school readiness” (see note 17). The circulation of the EDI helped to spawn the development of yet another index of early development as a modifiable determinant of outcomes, the World Health Organization’s Human Opportunity Index, that organization’s spin on an aggregate indicator of ‘readiness’ or ‘capability’ (see The World Bank, 2010, p. 12).
Both “capabilities” and resilience only make sense within what Burman (2008) has called the “normative chronology” of development, within which natural processes can be delayed by identifiable “malfunctioning agents” (p. 186). Sen’s capabilities can be shaped, at least in part, by contingent sociohistorical facts (for example, “group segregation, stigma, shunning, and other unjust informal social norms […] that interfere with individuals’ functioning as equals” [Anderson, 2010, p. 88]). However, the capabilities approach grasps these contingencies as potential “malfunctioning agents” within the framework of an individual life.
Elizabeth Anderson and Ingrid Robeyns defend Sen against charges of psychologism in their contributions to Measuring Justice (2010, eds. Brighouse and Robeyns). Anderson argues that thinking about “capabilities” can include those “discriminatory failures of society to provide [a person] with the resources and social environment they need” (p. 96). Sen’s (1999a) “capabilities”, however, zeroes in on the variability of the ‘human’ element, which means that it is constrained to show how those “discriminatory failures” (or “variations in social climate”) are modified by other factors: “personal heterogeneities”, “environmental diversities”, “differences in relational perspectives” and “distribution within the family” (pp. 70–71). The structural nature of discrimination is offset by the methodological emphasis on the way in which factors are configured differently in different lives.
For the idea that the pursuit of “procedural accomplishments” (for example, bolstered “capabilities” in a population, never mind structured, deepening income inequalities), works to disperse “collective energy”, we are indebted to Dean (2012, p. 60).
The second United Nations Human Development Report, published in 1992, offered what Burman has called an explicit “commodification of human development as a condition of economic development”, stating that “human development … is a form of investment, not just a means of distributing income” (Burman, 2008, p. 195; UNDP cit. in Burman, 2008, p. 196).
O’Brien (2014) and Nadesan (2010) address important differences within the government of children of the global North. On “technologies of optimization” for middle-class children exclusively, see Nadeson, chapter 3 (2010, p. 17). On resilience-based education in US private schools, see O’Brien.
The exchange between “resilience” and “capabilities” has been such that a 2010 editorial in the journal, Progress in Development Studies, observed, “[r]esilience has become a buzzword in contemporary thinking about sustainable development. Many see resilience as a precondition for sustainability” (Obrist, 2010, p. 279).
The developmental self can bridge the fields of psychology and national economic development by virtue of its unfolding along a normative and natural, but fragile evolutionary path. As Erica Burman reminds us, that linear path always implies a comparison between positions at starting and end points: children and adults, or – when the developmental self is projected to the scale of nations – the global South and the global North. The trajectory of development reduces any differences between the things being compared to matters of time (Burman, 2008, pp. 186, 198–199).
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Acknowledgements
An early version of this argument was presented at the Landscapes of Childhood conference at the University of Lethbridge in 2011. Thanks to Allison James and Patrizia Albanese for their encouragement on that occasion, and to Jacqueline Kennelly and Bruce Curtis for comments on a later version. We are grateful to Dan McDonald for research assistance.
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Henderson, J., Denny, K. The resilient child, human development and the “postdemocracy”. BioSocieties 10, 352–378 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.24