Humanities and Resilience
3 replies. Feel free to respond to other points made in the "Editor's Column," and maybe even ask a question or two.
1) LeMenager and Foote explain the importance of exploring resilience in the context of humanities: “In a world that seems to be dominated by scarcity, our ability to adapt and move forward depends on not seeing the big picture, on not recognizing the scale or the interconnectedness of the problems that we face.” Understanding resilience is significant for human beings. Through resilience, humanity can manage the rampant crises using scarce resources. Multi-sector crises are inherent in the world today, humanities can be useful in mitigating them.
LeMenager and Foote report, “the term “resilience” derives from the Latin verb “resiler,” meaning “to draw back, distance oneself from an undertaking” or “recoil in repugnance,” we appreciate that the populist notion of resilience as “bounce-back” includes disgust at the way things are... In other words, resilience hacks its own brand.” The populist interpretation of ‘resilience’ is contrary to the Latin meaning. In the context of the Latin language, resilience encourages aversion; therefore, resilience, in the Latin context does not offer positive connotations. Comparatively, the populist interpretation depicts resilience as a positive trait that should be embraced. Therefore, the populist meaning hacks the precise meaning which is connoted in the Latin language.
LeMenager and Foote intend to "to occupy resilience for the purpose of thinking and acting together.” This proposal encourages compromise between humanities and other fields. The compromise would ensure that there is a ‘ common language’ to describe and uphold resilience.Additionally, LeMenager and Foote explain, “Within our practice of resilience we include resistance through efforts of collaboration, consensus building only with tolerance for defiant remainders, and a workable, if messy, democracy of scholarly voices in the public forum.” The practice would ensure that there is harmony between all fields in matters relating to resilience. Moreover, the consensus would accommodate other divergent voices. The proposed practice would promote democratic accord and collaboration in the promotion and advocacy for resilience.
2) LeMenager and Foote find resilience a useful concept for thinking about the state of humanities, because of it’s underlying presence in all of the field as a whole. In the grand scheme of things, humanities are too often excluded in the narrative due to its lack of fiscal value. In a way, humanities themselves have demonstrated resilience in staying relevant or existing in today’s sphere. To have humanities be a body that we write from and not towards, as mentioned in the article, is how resilience is tied into the state of humanities. If it can be resilient throughout other schools of thought, the state of humanities can be positively altered.
When the authors discuss the words of C.S. Hollings and explain that resilience “ hack[s]it’s own brand”, the major reasoning is that resilience is sticking it’s nose up at the adversity it has to overcome, while at the same time overtaking those challenging events. Therefore the hacking phrase. I find this interesting because it adds more foundation to the term resilience while understanding that those initially challenging circumstances should not be normative, instead overcame now and fixed in the future.
LeMenager and Foote intend to occupy resilience by creating a scholarly language commons, or some sort of adjustment that allows all of these different groups to be addressed altogether in one cross-sectional field. They hope to practice resilience by combining “thinkers, scholars, writers...” (LeMenager et al, 2014) and creating the ability for all these fields to merge and communicate ideas and thoughts.
3) Being experts in the humanities in particular and being aware of the ignored and undervalued state of the humanities in a utilitarian society, LeMenager and Foote think “Resilience as an idea and as a practice in an age of scarcity ought to be tenuous and dangerous”. According to them, their journal with a name Resilience in part carries their hope of the environmental humanities “as a field of abundance and profusion rather than scarcity and crippling precarity.” In this way, they endow the concept of resilience with new meaning related to the current situation of the humanities. The term resilience originates from a Latin verb “resiler”, which means “to draw back, distancing oneself form undertaking”. Therefore, the connotation of resilience includes “a necessary self-distancing from the normative”, namely “hacking its own brand”. Similarly, the authors would take resilience back from the neoliberal who claim the word for themselves. Moreover, the authors intend to occupy and practice resilience by using the journal “as a bridge toward scholarly language commons” instead of common
language to share the intellectual commitment with common readers and by inviting people from different fields to make their own voices on what it means to resile. This conception of resilience is different from others that we’ve seen thus far, since it seems more radical than our stereotype of resilience, which often means endurance, restraint and withdrawal.