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- Convenor:
-
Hussein Zeidan
(Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Is resilience merely a property of systems? This panel explores resilience as a lived and cultivated capacity of scientists themselves, those who engage with, imagine, and construct resilient futures.
Description
The conference mantra, “things could be otherwise”, holds critical promise. Yet, it may also risk being read as a celebratory nod to “non-human resilience” alone. This panel seeks to connect these conversations and balance them with another central concern within STS: the situated production of science and technology, which examines who produces them and under what conditions.
STS insights on infrastructures (Star, 1999), sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff, 2019), and care (de La Bellacasa, 2017) further demonstrate that resilience is enacted through everyday practices: repair, maintenance, and the cultivation of livable futures. Additionally, critical genealogies of resilience (e.g., Evans & Reid, 2014) emphasise its complexity beyond mere survivability, demonstrating that resilience is not a neutral concept but a mode of governance that often shifts adaptation burdens onto communities, individuals, or ecosystems (Walker & Cooper, 2011).
Remaining attentive to the risk of reinforcing a human/non-human binary, this panel turns attention to scientists themselves. It asks: how is the resilience of scientific actors conceptualised by those studying resilient systems? What traits, capacities, and conditions are seen as necessary for scientists to navigate uncertainty, disruption, and complexity within dynamic sociotechnical environments?
These questions resonate with broader educational and institutional reforms that call for cultivating capacities to work across boundaries (such as Transdisciplinarity, etc). By foregrounding the lived experiences and practices of scientific actors, this panel seeks to open space for rethinking resilience, not as a static attribute of systems or subjects, but as a relational and contested process that unfolds within dynamic, interdependent worlds.
de La Bellacasa, M. P. (2017). Matters of Care. U Minnesota Press.
Evans, B., & Reid, J. (2014). Resilient Life. Wiley.
Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (Eds.). (2019). Dreamscapes of Modernity. U Chicago Press.
Star, S. L. (1999). “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” Am. Behav. Scientist, 43(3), 377–391.
Walker, J., & Cooper, M. (2011). “Genealogies of Resilience.” Security Dialogue, 42(2), 143–160