Interesting alternatives if not contradictions in understanding “resilience” in recent publications.

Stephanie Wakefield & Bruce Braun understand resilience as a Foucauldian dispositif (apparatus):

we understand resilience as a mode of governing the ‘ecological’ city.

In Resilient Life, a new book by Brad Evans and Julian Reid, they also think of it as a mode of governing:

‘resilience’ … is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century…

But the book is then blurbed as follows:

Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency.

My interest here is not so much whether this is an accurate summation of their book (which is not yet out) but that the discourse of resilience is framed as disempowering (the word used is “nihilistic”).

I wrote about this last year here, in the context of Neocleous’ piece in