[ecrea] Call for Papers - Political Action, Resilience and Solidarity

Call for Papers

....

Political Action, Resilience and Solidarity

An inter-disciplinary, inter-institutional workshop

Event organisers:

Nicholas Michelsen, King's College London
Wanda Vrasti, University of Humboldt

In association with:
• Centre of Integrated Research in Risk and Resilience, King's College 
London.
• Research Centre in International Relations, Department of War Studies, 
King's
• College London.
• Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, The Open University
• Centre for the Study of Democracy, Westminster University.

Location: King's College London.

Thursday the 18th and Friday the 19th of September 2014

The concept of resilience first appeared as a means to articulate how 
complex ecosystems
are able to meet the challenges of radically shifting environmental 
conditions whilst
retaining their key functionalities. Thinking in terms of resilience is 
deemed to offer an
advance on previous approaches to risk-management in that it is 
concerned with fostering
the adaptive capacities that are innate to any system. Inasmuch as 
resilience allows a
system, community or agent's inherent openness to the unexpected to 
become a source of
beneficiary adaptation, it has garnered attention in a wide number of 
fields, from socio-
ecological systems to psychology, disaster risk management, urban and 
national
infrastructure design, post-conflict development and public health 
planning. Across these
fields, the concept of resilience increasingly frames the possibility of 
spaces for policy action,
offering a heuristic device under which the defining problems of our era 
of supposedly
unalloyed uncertainty and insecurity can be addressed.

Contemporary debates around resilience have centred on the political 
content of the
concept. Whereas in socio-ecological literatures, the concept has 
retained a broadly positive
connotation, as a means to conceptualise sustainable resource 
management, in its wider
usage, resilience is subject to critique as informing a conservative, 
indeed pacifying
rationality of governance ("resilience from above"). Resilience seems to 
bypass any
suggestion that extant (social, economic, political and ecological) 
circumstances might be
subjected to a wider or structural critique.

In this context, resilience is often contrasted with explicitly 
political concepts like solidarity.
Whereas resilience seems to suggest adaptation and immunisation in the 
face of complex
unalterable forces, solidarity offers a means to challenge and alter 
extant conditions. By
contrast with resilience, however, the concept of solidarity suffers 
from significant under-
theorisation in contemporary literatures. What does it mean to "act in 
solidarity" with
something or someone, and how is this related to the performance of 
political subjectivity
or citizenship? What does it mean for activists in Tahrir Square to 
stand in solidarity with
government employees in Madison? We suspect that the concept must be 
more than just
an affective unification of a group of otherwise disparate actors. 
Indeed, rather than being
diametrically opposed concepts, solidarity seems a precondition for 
community resilience
("resilience from below"). In this sense, perhaps it is at the 
intersection of solidarity and
resilience that effective political action can occur.

Equally important is the intersection between resilience and democratic 
citizenship.
Resilience often refers to policies that aim at making citizens able to 
cope with sudden
changes in their life through, among other methods, taking therapeutic 
measures; informing
them what to do in times of disaster; and supporting critical 
infrastructure so important
activities can continue. Yet, this understanding of resilience eschews 
the idea that coping
with depletion of rights requires new rights claims. Rights to housing, 
care, political
participation, and so on, are mostly ignored. Resilience policies become 
in their effects
'managerial'. They tell citizens what to do and they avoid the 
fundamental democratic
questions about what social, economic and political rights and lives 
citizens demand. At this
intersection between rights claims and resilience, resilience from below 
-- what people do in
response to crises and precarity – attains democratic political rather 
than managerial
significance.

This collaborative inter-institutional and interdisciplinary workshop is 
concerned to examine
and problematize the distinct genealogies and interaction of the 
concepts of Resilience,
Solidarity, and democratic citizenship with particular focus on the 
problem of political action
or agency. It aims to explore the ways in which community resilience may 
be associated or
contrasted with the mechanisms underpinning social and political 
solidarity and with new
rights claims. A number of related concepts, such as identity, acts of 
citizenship and political
agency, are clearly of relevance in this context. As such, we invite 
paper abstracts of no
more than 300 words that speak to the workshop theme in the broadest 
sense. Possible
areas for discussion include:

Activism

Affect

Citizenship

Conflict and post-conflict reconstruction

Development

Disasters

Ethics

Group psychology

Identity politics

Public health

Political theory/philosophy

Radical Democracy

Revolutionary politics

Social Movements

Socio-ecological systems

Transformative communities

Urban Infrastructure

Please send paper abstracts by June 20th to (nicholas.michelsen /at/ kcl.ac.uk)

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