Resilience‐as‐doing: A relational model for living practice

Vollständiger Abstract

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Abstract Dominant frameworks treat resilience as a capacity to withstand disturbance and recover, something systems, communities or individuals either have or lack. This paper proposes a different understanding, grounded in relational onto‐epistemology and first‐person, practice‐based, autoethnographic inquiry situated within a household garden. I develop a conceptual model of resilience‐as‐doing: situated participation within an entangled, more‐than‐human relational field, rather than a property to be built or measured. Here resilience can be defined as: ‘witnessing, participating in and knowing relations (of place) as nature, and carefully and consciously tending, and being tended by, those relations as an ethical world‐making practice’. The model makes four contributions. It reconceptualises the relational field as the ontological ground of resilience practice. That is, entities exist, but not as independent, self‐contained units with intrinsic or pre‐determined properties. It positions attunement, the partial, embodied, effortful orientation toward what is happening in the relations around and through you, as central to participation. It identifies four modes through which relations and assemblages are encountered: latent, emerging, persisting and decomposing. And it names three conditions through which the nature of participation is enacted: orientation (i.e. the direction of doing: what is noticed, tended and drawn toward; and of becoming emerging through relations rather than determining them); capacity (i.e. what is actually available in any given moment: energy, time, skill, tools, support. Capacity is interdependent rather than individual, always shaped by conditions and relations within which one is embedded); and agency (i.e. where action is possible within the relational field. Agency is shared across bodies, institutions, social norms and more‐than‐human lives and entities, and always as response to what the field makes possible). Combined, these elements enable a practice that cultivates care and offers a way of understanding how resilience can be lived as practice. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.