Michalinos Zembylas (2020): Against the psychologization of resilience: towards an onto-political theorization of the concept and its implications for higher education, Studies in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/03075079.2019.1711048

Words! I read three articles yesterday, and Zembylas's article had the most words and was the wordiest. I think about wordiness like being blinded by science…I often either get wrapped up or caught in the words, like they have charisma, or I find myself rejecting them, as if authors were being snooty. Sometimes it takes a second or third reading to get past the initial rejection/acceptance mode of reading to see what’s actually being said.

This one basically highlighted the risks of focusing on resilience as an individual quality (resilience, psychologized). He argues that emphasizing individual resilience without considering society-level forces (such as racism) can act like gas lighting. He puts resilience in the category of grit and growth mindset.

I don’t know who is focusing on resilience as an individual quality…but this author likely knows the lay of the higher education land better than me. I wouldn't be surprised if resilience was being used like growth mindset...like a club to beat people over the head with. "You don't have enough growth mindset! You need a better attitude!" and/or "You are too fragile, you need more resilience! Don't you want to be more resilient!?"

This is a risk I've been cognizant of. I spent some time considering the ways in which resilience was and was not like growth mindset. Zembylas helps illustrate the fact that resilience isn't one essentialist thing. It is taken up, it is deployed, it can be backed by various theories that determine whether or not it is easy or difficult to weaponize. Growth mindset comes out of cognitive motivation theory, and it has been deployed all over K12 schools. "Your brain is a muscle, with effort and proper strategies, you can overcome obstacles." Unfortunately, growth mindset is often taught without attention to contextual factors. It is a pull-your- brain-up-by-its-bootstraps philosophy. Resilience can be similar, but in my view, has potential to avoid that philosophy.

I was happy to see in the Zembylas article that the kinds of resilience he advocates for are in the family of the kind I’ve been trained in, and have been conceptualizing myself. It’s “community resilience,” and it’s embodied, and material, and has as its goal transformation. No one can or should tell you to be more resilient. No one can or should tell you to divorce building resilience from your longings and visions for the world that should be.

A few quotes I picked out:

Deriving from the Latin for ‘to jump again,’ ‘resilience’ has sprung into new life as a catchword in inter- national development and Silicon Valley and among parenting pundits and TED-heads. (Standhal, in Zembylas) p1 [TED-heads! :)]

The discourse of resilience originated in the field of ecology in the early 1970s to describe the capacities of ecosystems to adapt to hazards which otherwise would threaten their survival (cf. Holling, 1973) p2 [I can't seem to find anything further back]

Ahmed (2017) suggests that resilience becomes "a deeply conservative technique, one especially well suited to governance: you encourage bodies to strengthen so they will not succumb to pressure; so they keep taking it; so they can take more of it. Resilience is the require- ment to take more pressure; such that the pressure can be gradually increased." (189) p3 [Always go see what Sara Ahmed has to say]

As universities increasingly turn their attention towards employability (Saun- ders 2014), they encourage students to cultivate their individual levels of resilience, while discouraging them from imagining themselves as political agents who could collectively work to challenge harmful or unjust working and life practices (Webster and Rivers 2018). p4

a superficial promotion of resilience in higher education fails to take into consideration those students who are already structurally disadvantaged whose experiences of ‘success’ ‘will be masked by complex intersections between gender, race, (dis)ability, and discrimination’ (Webster and Rivers 2018, 4). Focusing blindly on resilience, then, as an individual responsibility and achievement misses the complexities of intersecting factors that may hinder the academic performance or progress of socially disadvantaged groups of students, shifting the blame from socially unjust structures to individuals....Even when resilience is presented ‘as a means to tackle social injustice and inequalities,’ we should be suspicious because ‘the focus nonetheless remains on adapting the individual to cope with outside pressures in order to negate their effects, rather than seeking to eradicate these pressures in the first place’ (Webster and Rivers 2018, 4). p4 [interesting here to see this suspicion, justified in particular in situations in which individuals are atomized, not in solidarity.]

Resilience is seen as a ‘solution’ to enduring social and educational problems con- cerning the declining emotional and psychological well-being of students deemed to be ‘vulnerable.’ Interventions such as the cultivation of resilience, growth mindset and grit (Webster and Rivers 2018) utilize a psychologized vocabulary of vulnerability, trauma, and anxiety to legitimize particular practices of emotional support and psychological well-being (Ecclestone 2011, 2012; Ecclestone and Brunila 2015). p5-6 [here my ears perked up, seeing the vocabulary of trauma. Zembylas here is criticizing the discourse of vulnerability...'you are vulnerable, fragile, weak, not tough, you need to do the practices I prescribe.' This is a trap that goes right to character education and "good" citizenship.]

an ecological approach to resilience emphasizes the notion of ‘ecol- ogies of resilience,’ namely the idea that resilience is a social and political process rather than some- thing that people ‘have’ or develop as individuals (Ungar 2012). Ungar points out that the critical question about resilience is how ‘social and physical ecologies make resilience possible’ (2012, 2). p6

There are three important tenets in reframing resilience, as those emerge from the theoretical perspectives discussed here: (1) Resilience is a relational and political concept rather than a fixed psychologized entity; what is common in different theoretical perspectives is that they seek to expose relations of power within resilience thinking or practice by showing how resilience capacity and building are not simply natural or universal, but rather terrains of contestation (Walsh-Dilley and Wolford 2015). (2) Paying attention to contextual understandings and meanings of resilience – what these meanings are, where they come from, how they come to be – expose the political tensions, complexities, and ambiguities that resilience interventions can have. ....(3) A critical engagement with resilience on the basis of these theoretical perspectives suggests that any discourse or practice of resilience organizes political space in ways that may fail to advance some social justice agendas. The contribution, then, of approaching resilience from a critical approach is that it recognizes the role of different stakeholders and sources of knowledge, skill and other resources and challenges their consequences and effectiveness on social justice agendas. p7-8

I would also add that it is a politically naïve, and therefore, dangerous construct, because it is complicit in the reproduction of superficial narratives of success and achievement in higher education. It is complicit because foregrounding psychologized and neoliberal resilience back- grounds the power of structural racism both within and beyond universities. p10