Reframing Resilience: ‘Bouncing Back’ as a Problematic Paradigm
Rarely a week goes by in my world where the word resilience isn’t mentioned in at least one work-related conversation. There are two reasons for this. The first is the nature of my role: designing learning around the pedagogy of employability for a team of academics and careers professionals. The second is the proliferation of graduate attribute frameworks in Higher Education which incorporate resilience, either as a stand-alone attribute or embedded in the descriptor of another.
Indeed, resilience and employability often go hand in hand and rightly so, when you consider the world into which students are now graduating. This is even more so the case in the creative industries which fundamentally would not function without the good will and resilience of creative graduates. A whole piece could be dedicated to the precarity of creative employment, but for those of you not familiar with the nuance of the creative industries, take a deep breath and consider these widespread practices: chronic under-valuing of art production; the proliferation of casual contracts and toxic workplace cultures; the persistent and pernicious idea that ‘exposure’ is a form of pay; the frequent abuse of creatives’ intellectual property rights; and the less glamorous side of multi-hyphenate careers. I could go on. These poor, and sometimes illegal, employment practices mean a creative individual’s career aspirations can only be achieved, at least in part, by being resilient.
Right?
Yet, I’ve long felt a rumble of unease when resilience is suggested as part of the solution to the employment challenges students and graduates face. It’s not that I’m wholesale against resilience as a concept, rather that I find there’s a lot of lazy language used in discussions of resilience and a lack of consideration around the external mechanisms at play.
The language of resilience
My initial doubts about resilience as panacea to all employability woes, centre around the peripheral language of resilience. It is frequently described as the idea of ‘bouncing back’ from a set-back. Bouncing back suggests, to me, some sort of invisible safety net that catches an individual when they fall and rebounds them to an appropriate orientation and trajectory. In this example, as with other phrases such as ‘pushing through’, there is also frequently a focus on momentum and expediency - the ideal being that one can, and indeed should, recover quickly from setbacks.
What ideas of safety and speed fail to attend to though is the wider systemic issues that might impact an individual’s ability to be, or become, resilient.
Individual vs systemic failure
This leads me to my own deeper sense of discomfort around the narrative of resilience: that it is an individual, internalised state that one embodies, which can be developed and activated at will. I see this reflected in students’ and graduates’ perceptions of their own resilience, or lack thereof. They despair at needing to become more resilient, often forcing themselves to move beyond disappointment without first attending to it. They take individual responsibility for their ability to be resilient as if it’s a simple matter of personal choice.
What this internalised narrative completely overlooks is the structural failures in the labour market, and capitalism at large, that impact an individual’s capacity to be resilient. Systemic issues cannot, and should not need to, be overcome by individuals through sheer willpower.
Interwoven strands of privilege
A simplistic, individualised and internalised resilience narrative also overlooks the privilege of resilience. If I return to the visual of a safety net that allows an individual to ‘bounce-back’ after disappointment, closer inspection often reveals that this safety net is comprised of multiple interwoven strands of privilege. This privilege might consist of access to a connected network, financial support from family or nurturing childhood experiences, among other things.
If I have an extensive network to tap into, thanks in part to a family full of well-connected ‘professionals’, then it is much easier for me to pick myself up after a disappointment, dust myself off and explore a potential myriad of Plan Bs. Yes, it takes resilience to do this, but there are limited opportunities to enact resilience in the absence of accessible Plan Bs.
Similarly, if I have a financial safety net that I can rely on when a particular opportunity doesn’t pan out, I likely won’t feel the same degree of panic as someone without such financial resources at their disposal. If you’re panicked, you’re also unlikely to make the best decisions for yourself which, in turn, can have wide-reaching implications that, ironically, require further and repeated reliance on being resilient.
Without a degree in psychology I can only dance around the edges of understanding how challenging childhood experiences impact the development of a secure sense of self – but anecdotally I’ve observed how not feeling anchored and secure in who you are means seemingly ‘minor’ set-backs can unmoor a person and leave them at sea unable to reach the safety of dry land.
Should these scenarios be considered a failure of an individual’s resilience? Or can we consider the dominant resilience paradigm sets many up to fail?
Attending to context
In reflecting on my own perspectives on resilience and its place in the graduate outcomes narrative, I have felt encouraged by reading and listening to others who explore notions of resilience and context including: considerations of social ecological conceptualisations of resilience; unpacking dynamic notions of resilience; explorations of economic, social and cultural capitals; reflections on experiences of systemic racism and resilience; and the problem with telling students who are struggling to be more resilient. Yet, when it comes to general discussions and support around resilience in Higher Education, the prevailing paradigm still seems to neglect the wider context and structural barriers.
Understanding context is important for all students and graduates, but even more so for those experiencing mental health issues, disabled students and/or those who have experienced a lifetime of micro-aggressions that have undermined their confidence and sense of safety. While these individuals are likely to have experience of being resilient by necessity, this does not always grant them more ease to face setbacks that differ to their usual challenges, or indeed setbacks which compound these very challenges.
In all scenarios where structural barriers and systemic disadvantage are at play, it’s potentially damaging to be told that the answer to the challenges you’re facing is to ‘become more resilient’. Even if we put in place opportunities to develop resilience such as tailored workshops, supported work-based learning opportunities etc., we need do so in a way that reframes a lack of resilience as a systemic failing, rather than an individual one. From there it is possible to move the narrative on from what one needs to do to become more resilient, to understanding resilience and agency in context.
Supporting resilience in context
To shift the paradigm to one that takes account of this context issues there are subtle steps that can be taken to compliment current approaches.
Encourage graduates to consider the own positionality, that is, the social and political context that shapes their identity. This can help them to explore who they are in relation to the world and the external factors at play
Explicitly introduce the notion of privilege and structural barriers to depersonalise their experience of resilience, transforming resilience from an internalised experience to one shaped by external factors
Create space for graduates to feel their disappointment. Attending to disappointment and discomfort while framing it in the wider context, often supports individuals to work through adversity more quickly and in a more meaningful way.
In my own team these considerations manifest in our focus on supporting individuals holistically by attending to wellbeing and positionality, while also shining a light on systemic issues. We aim to do so in ways that inspire hope and encourage students to explore what it might mean to be the change-makers of the future who disrupt the current structural barriers, particularly in the creative industries. We do all of this while acknowledging our own needs, putting in place safe boundaries and ensuring we have robust signposting processes in place.
The future of resilience
To speak of resilience without addressing the wider-context of employment and employability is problematic. It’s time to move away from dominant narratives that imply force, pressure and indifference to suffering, and change the conversation to one which centres each individual’s positionality, their life story and how it uniquely interacts with the employment eco-system they exist within. This, in turn, can create space to sit with failure, give it grace and then move forward mindfully and, perhaps ironically, with greater capacity for resilience.
About the author
Hannah Breslin is an autistic academic who speaks and writes about the pedagogy of employability, leadership, autistic experiences and the intersections across all three. She currently leads a team of academics and careers professionals that sits within Careers & Employability at UAL.
