Terms of Endurance: Neoliberalism, Adaptive Agency, and the Burden of Resilience

• In Event: 14.044 - Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: 14.044-24 - Praxis and Pedagogy: Creating Legitimacy Through Resistance

Abstract

The concept of “resilience” has become increasingly popular in public discourse, not only as a general resource for enduring and overcoming personal struggles, but as an educational concept that purportedly challenges deficit-model approaches to overcoming structural inequalities for students deemed “at-risk of educational failure.” In critical theory more broadly, resilience has been critiqued as a discourse that normalizes crisis and social injury. This paper challenges the burden of resilience, which is placed on the socially unprotected as a way of legitimizing violence and dispossession through its falsely affirmative definition. Arguing that resilience advances an “adaptive” theory of agency, the paper argues for a reconceptualization of the terms of endurance governing the neoliberal discourse of educational crisis.

Author

• Graham B. Slater, University of Utah