Course:LIBR559A/Vardy, M., & Smith, M. (2017).

citation

Berg, J., Galvan, A., & Tewell, E. (2017). Academic Libraries and the False Promises of Resiliency. Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene Colloquium, (p. 32). Retrieved from https://eamontewell.files.wordpress.com/2008/03/academic-libraries-and-the-false-promises-of-resiliency-laac-2017.pdf

Purpose:

“Resilience has rapidly become the most used and abused term in contempary policy and decision making. Like the idiom of “sustainable development,” it incorporates multiplicities of difference into a single and apparently incontrovertible consensus. …In large part, however, the problem with the resilience discourse is the ease with which it can be applied indiscriminately to any and all circumstances, obscuring the power that comes with providing authoritative representations of nature” (pp 175-6).

Main argument:

Resilience theory is viewed as being applied without regard to appropriate circumstances. The across the board application of narratives of resilience encourage narratives of system survival and de-emphasizing elements “marginal to system survival” (p 176). To demonstrate their thesis, Vardy and Smith summarize existing literature of resilience theory while examine those rhetorics in a framework of precarity.

Method:

Vardy and Smith write a succinct primer and critique on resilience theory surveying resilience literature. Resilience theory as described in the article is applied in diverse fields from “urban planning, international security, environmental policy, financial regulation, development economics” (p 175), as well as “emergency preparedness, self-help, and libraries” (Berg, Galvan, & Tewell, 2017).

Topics:

System design, adaptation, group norms, methodology, precarity, radical change, resilience, system survival, vulnerability

The concepts of the article seek to delineate what is advantageous to a system from what is other to the system; the concepts seek to separate what is useful to a system versus what is not useful.

Theoretical Framework:

Resilience theory is presented as a “discourse …to present narratives that all too often adhere to univocal holism and homogeneity in a way that excludes the messiness of the world” (p 176); it can be thought of as a kind of determinism. While technological determinism claims a technology as the progenitor of all that come after, resilience theory relates all elements with an agency and as either belonging or not belonging to systems. Those elements belonging to the system have their agency validated by belonging to the system. Those elements not belonging to the system are marginalized and their agency endangered. Understanding resiliency theory from a design perspective allows a more nuanced interpretation of social constructions.

Novel ideas:

As resilience theory moves forward in critique academics are taking up the model to examine how individuals participate in institutions. Academics are taking up the challenge, implicit in resilience theory, that individuals are responsible as individuals for success or failure within systems which are designed for various purposes. An excellent accompaniment to this article is the presentation reference earlier; Page author: Erin Brown