Resilience

Resilience and Narrative

Walker & Cooper (2011) trace back the history of the concept of resilience. It originated in an academic context in the 1970s as a dominant discourse in natural resource management, was taken up in post-9/11 American discourse as “a byword among agencies charged with coordinating security responses to climate change, critical infrastructure protection, natural disasters, pandemics and terrorism” (p.144), and was eventually being framed by the United Nations as “the capacity to thrive in the face of challenge” (UNDP et al. 2008:p.ix). In this 2008 report, three different dimensions exist in conceptualizing resilience, namely 1] economic resilience, or to be “better able to face economic risks” (p.ix), 2] social resilience, to be “better able to work together for mutual benefit” (p.ix), and 3] biological resilience, to be “more productive and stable” (p.ix).

There are, however, some fundamental problems with this way of looking at resilience. According to Béné, Wood, Newsham & Davies (2012), a big limitation of this definition for the field of social sciences is “its inability to appropriately capture and reflect social dynamics in general and consider issues of agency and power” (p.12). These authors argue that a technical and systemic lens of looking at resilience strategies fails to see the different institutions of power that influence the way in which people are susceptible to changes, shocks or changing contexts, as well as how specific individuals and groups deal with these changes, or, in other words, how notions of power and agency “interplay in fostering or impeding flexibility, innovation, and transformation” (p.29).

They come up with a dynamic framework to make sense of how individuals can adapt to changes in relation to higher structures of power, ranging from absorptive coping capacity

(or “persistence”), through adaptive capacity (or “incremental adjustment”), towards transformative capacity (or “transformational responses”) (p.21).

In their definition, resilience is “the ability of a system to accommodate positively adverse changes and shocks, simultaneously at different scales and with consideration of all the different components and agents of the system, through the complementarities of its absorptive, adaptive and transformative capacities” (p.48).

Kirmayer, Dandeneau, Marshall, Philips & Williamson (2011) see resilience as a constant negotiation between the collective and the personal, as “people may make sense of their own predicaments and map possibilities for adaptation and a positive vision of their identity and future prospects by drawing on collective history, myths, and sacred teachings” (p.85/86). In Inuit cosmology, for example, resilience can be found in expressions and stories that go beyond the limit of the body of a person. The words “ajurnarmat” (cannot be helped) and “isumamminik” (on its own will) reflect a form of resilience that is directly related to “achieving the best balance among the forces around the person” (p.88), contrary to the western notion of seeing the self as being at the center of things.

Resilience, in this sense, is thus grounded in cultural values, and as such, narrative is at the center of its expression. The authors emphasize narrative as a tool to help “capture some of the individual variations in strategies of resilience” (p.86). It is thus in personal stories, in relation to the wider community, that we can unravel different ideas of resilience and dissent towards larger processes, and it is in these personal narratives that we can see the way that these individuals relate to the larger group in dealing with for instance oppression, uprootedness or violence.

In the same way, we might find narratives of resilience through looking at personal stories from migrants within the collective of the Globe Aroma community, and ways of reacting to larger processes of police aggression in Brussels. We chose to look at Globe Aroma as an actor in its own right, as we intend to highlight the process of and strengthen the resilience of the staff members as well as the participants in establishing and maintaining a space for migrants and newcomer-artists to meet each other and engage in communal art projects. The different meanings, desires and characteristics given to Globe Aroma as a space, from the perspective of its staff members, interns, volunteers, newcomer-artists, visitors, coffee-drinkers and Wi-Fi users alike, to voice intricate emotions, feelings and experiences through engaging in art projects and other creative practices thus jointly constitute the strategies of resilience of Globe Aroma as an actor vis-à-vis an increasingly volatile and precarious migration context in Brussel.