Centering at the Margins: Critical Community Resilience Praxis

Introduction

Chile is characterized by the continuous occurrence of natural hazards and disasters, including earthquakes and tsunamis and increasing floods and fires. Milliano, Faling, Clark-Ginsberg, Crowley, and Gibbons (2015) argue for conceptualizations of disasters that take into account “multirisk environments,” which include “slow and rapid onset emergencies, violent conflict, climate change, and other global challenges such as pandemics and biodiversity loss, as well as chronic political, economic, and societal fragility” (p. 25). Furthermore, Wisner and Kelman (2015) argue that it is important to acknowledge at least four overlapping hazard categories when considering disasters, including natural hazards (e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions), technological hazards (e.g., oil spills, nuclear power plant disasters, and transportation-related crashes), violent social crisis (e.g., wars, terrorist attacks, gun massacres, gang-related community violence, assassinations, detentions, torture, and disappearances by state-led repressive regimes), and nonviolent social crisis (e.g., chronic poverty, structural discrimination, and the presence of slow yet continuous socioenvironmental changes that reduce accessibility and availability of key resources and human rights). When approaching understandings and designing interventions for addressing the human impacts of these overlapping dimensions of disasters, it is important to consider the ways in which many postcolonial societies worldwide, such as Chile, are not only nation-states at risk for natural hazards, but they are also social ecosystems marked by complex social inequities (Agostini, Brown, & Roman, 2010; Cabieses, Bernales, Obach, & Pedrero, 2016; Tijoux, 2016). For example, some of these inequities that intersect with disasters include income inequality, structural racism, and gender-based oppression, which overlap and challenge opportunities for resilience across multiple levels and domains (Atallah, 2016).

Moreover, these historical and ongoing social inequities are rooted in “coloniality” (Quijano, 2000). According to Maldonado-Torres (2007), colonialism is a multifaceted social structure, where the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of a different nation or people. Even in postcolonial societies, however, long after formal colonial structures are dismantled and nation-states achieve “independence” from their previous colonial rulers, coloniality continues. Maldonado-Torres (2007) defines coloniality as the “long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (p. 243). Therefore, in this article, we at the Chilean National Research Center for Integrated Natural Disaster Management (CIGIDEN) introduce a critical framework that tries to incorporate decolonial, social justice perspectives and interrogate the role of long-standing inequities shaped by coloniality and social suffering on resilience pathways in disasters.

CIGIDEN’s principal goal is to contribute to understandings and the development of policies and practices capable of promoting improved hazard prediction, prevention, and response to disasters locally and globally using resilience as a core framework. In the conclusion of this article, we share a table that we have developed at CIGIDEN grounded on our literature reviews, disaster preparedness and response practice experiences, and theoretical mapping of resilience constructs across disciplines, and across “waves,” or the trends frequently discussed by resilience researchers (e.g., Atallah, 2016; Milliano et al., 2015; Richardson, 2002; Wright, Masten, & Narayan, 2013). More specifically, we characterize and describe three “waves” in the literature.

Next, we present our critical framework of resilience, emphasizing a refocusing on understanding how disasters are embedded in patterns of inequities and social suffering, determined by life-world conditions and caused by interplays between material, psychological, and sociopolitical processes that create disproportionate adversities in marginalized communities. When approaching resilience research, we draw on Latin American liberation psychology (e.g., Fals-Borda, 1985; Montero, 2000), particularly work grounded in the critical pedagogy of Freire (1970), in addition to critical race theory (e.g., Ford & Airhihenbuwa, 2010; Hardeman, Medina, & Kozhimannil, 2016; Schulz & Mullings, 2006) with an emphasis on mapping racism and intersecting structural oppressions while generating practical applications toward eliminating them. In this light, we hope to give meaning to strategies that explicitly incorporate social justice frameworks here at CIGIDEN, arguing for more transdisciplinary critical community resilience “praxis” (i.e., the process of carrying theory into practice). This involves robust and genuine inclusion of bottom-up participatory approaches, empowerment of local communities, and making way for differently positioned stakeholders to participate in all stages of disaster risk reduction, preparedness, reconstruction, and emergency response. Before explaining our critical community resilience praxis (CCRP), we will first review related physical and social sciences literatures.

Bouncing Back: Resilience as the Capacity to Protect the Status Quo

Resilience thinking is currently at the forefront of diverse global discourses across a wide-range of disciplines and institutions (e.g., International Federation of Red Cross, 2016; Rockefeller Foundation, 2016; SPHERE, 2011). The word “resilience” originates from the Latin term resilio, which means to rebound or bounce (Alexander, 2013). Historically, resilience was a concept primarily used by engineers, developmental psychologists, psychiatrists, geographers, and human ecologists to connote a system’s or a person’s capacity to maintain its functioning, structure, form, or state of equilibrium despite the presence of adverse external events (e.g., Adger, 2000; Bonanno, Brewin, Kaniasty, & La Greca, 2010; Bruneau et al., 2003; Holling, 1986; Klein, Nicholls, & Thomalla, 2003; Luthar, Cicchetti, & Becker, 2000; Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990; Teran, Fuentes, Atallah, & Yang, 2017). This idea overlaps with frameworks from physical sciences and disaster response that define resilience as an infrastructure’s ability to reduce systemic failure probabilities in the face of extreme dangers (e.g., Bruneau et al., 2003) or to recover quickly to protect the status quo after potentially devastating events (e.g., Applied Technology Council, 2010). In this light, resilience in the “first wave” relied heavily on engineering frameworks and translations of ideas from physical sciences to social sciences and biomedical understandings of the optimum outcome for people, and the reasonable time frames for recovery in response to stress, adversity, and/or hazards. A United Nations (2009) definition provides an example of this “first wave” thinking:

Resilience is the ability of a person, system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner (p. 24)

Wright et al. (2013) argue that the first wave of interests in resilience from psychology, human development, and psychiatry researchers tended to focus on better understanding individual-level resilience and the interplay of vulnerability and protective factors. Translations of ideas from physical and biomedical sciences are typically engaged in this line of thinking, which view vulnerability as risks with positive associations to systemic failure, reduction in functioning, or medical illness (including psychopathology). Clearly building off of biomedical thinking, Wright et al. (2013) give an example of vulnerability in “first wave” thinking as a person having a compromised immune system, which would increase her or his risk for infectious diseases. Again, drawing on biomedical metaphors, Wright et al. (2013) explain “protection” in first wave thinking as being related to factors that moderate the impacts of adversity, such as an antibody to a specific disease.

Furthermore, first wave thinking and research on resilience primarily involves scholarship embedded within discipline-specific silos. Findings can be helpful in designing targeted interventions when it is possible to identify a clear optimum equilibrium, or a desired status quo that should be protected and persist over time. This “first wave” thinking can prove to be very good at explaining resilience in material realities, yet less so for social realities. As Adger (2000) argued, “. . . no single indicator captures the totality of resilience” (p. 357). Cross-cultural mental health researchers and geographers cautioned that a given factor may be protective to resilience in one cultural context or situation and yet can cause vulnerability in another depending on complex social–political processes (e.g., Kirmayer, Sehdev, Whitley, Dandeneau, & Isaac, 2009; Weichselgartner & Kelman, 2014). Likewise, social workers and psychologists working on the frontlines with children and families in multistressed environments, such as Sandler (2001) and Ungar (2010), argued that when attempting to understand resilience, there is a need for improved conceptualizations of social ecologies of adversity and the nature of adverse conditions.

Similarly, when studying strength-based processes, some humanistic psychologists, such as Held (2004), have called for increased attention to contextual understandings and with nonbinary holistic thinking, which attempt to take into consideration how assets in one situation can become liabilities in another. In fact, Held (2004) argues that humanistic psychology offers important nuances to the study of human strengths. For example, the author claims that understanding human problems and contextual impacts are integral to understanding positive human responses to adversity. Moreover, Held (2004) warns against focusing on positivity, optimism, strengths, and resilience without appreciation of situational elements and how positive and negative human experiences are profoundly interconnected. Held (2004) goes on to cite numerous humanistic psychologists who theorize a dialectical relationship between human suffering on the one hand and positive qualities of life on the other. When criticizing scholars who endorse a polarizing binary between positivity versus negativity, Held (2004, p. 16) quotes Resnick, Warmoth, and Serlin (2001), who write,

Humanistic psychology is also nondualistic. From its holistic perspective, polarizing psychology into “good” and “bad” splits the fullness of the paradox . . . and therefore misses the complexity and nuances of the phenomenon. (p. 77)

Surely, a holistic approach is one of the pillars of humanistic psychology, affected by Charlotte Bühler’s work and others, who argued for the importance of psychologists considering the “whole person.” This holistic perspective has become widespread across numerous fields, yet it represented a significant paradigm shift in the mid-20th century Europe and the United States where Bühler was working and writing.

Influenced by these types of paradigm shifts, and perhaps, by the encounter with this paradox of suffering and well-being as being profoundly interrelated phenomena, the study of resilience in psychology and related fields has begun to focus less on studying human capacities that protect people from suffering, and more on beginning to emphasize the study of human adaptive processes. Researchers working on adaptation often show more willingness to work interdisciplinarily, and seek to include holistic thinking, setting out to chart how people navigate toward resources when healing and even growing—or bouncing forward—in the face of adversity (e.g., Manyena, 2006; Ungar, 2010; Werner & Smith, 2001; Wright et al., 2013).

Bouncing Forward: Resilience as the Process of Adapting to Adversity

Masten’s (2014) concept of “ordinary magic” is an example of “second wave” resilience thinking, or a paradigm shift by many researchers evidenced in the literature. Rather than an unchanging strength of a person, or a system’s unique capability to absorb and recover from an adversity or a hazard, second wave thinking takes more of a holistic approach and reframes resilience as a relational, intergenerational, and ecosystemic process stemming from changing resources and rights (Atallah, 2016; Masten, 2015; Shapiro, 2008; Tol et al., 2011; Ungar, 2010). This paradigm shift reaches beyond psychology and is also connected to decades of research, practice, and growing interest in human ecology, geography, and economics, which explore how “punctuated equilibriums” can actually push systems toward adaptation and growth (Levin, Barrett, Aniyar, & Baumol, 1998).

In psychological research, posttraumatic growth (PTG) and related constructs have gained recognition, helping to explain dynamic interplays between multisystemic stressors and social and cultural resources embedded within human adaptive journeys (Goldman & Galea, 2014; Hobfoll et al., 2007; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1998; Weiss & Berger, 2010). The PTG concept suggests that when people engage in adjustment, coping, and recovery processes after being exposed to trauma, they may experience shifts in their thinking, understandings, skills, spiritualties, and social relationships, which can lead to positive changes in their lives. PTG engages humanistic and developmental perspectives, hypothesizing that after being exposed to trauma, a person may experience psychopathology such as posttraumatic stress disorder, but at the same time, the same individual may also experience growth, drawing on metaphors from ecology, showing how at times, forests can survive fires only to grow back stronger after integrating new resources provided from the charred earth itself.

Building off of the PTG concept, Taylor (2012) recommends the idea of “suffering-induced transformational experiences” or SITES and argues that there is something “paradoxical” about how powerful human experiences of well-being and harmony can be related, or even prompted, by “states of intense despair, depression, or mental turmoil” (p. 31). For example, in a qualitative study by Punamäki (2010) with Palestinian political prisoners incarcerated in Israeli detention centers, the author showed how detainees not only survived disastrous contexts of torture, isolation, and humiliation, but they also grew through their responding to these challenges. Punamäki (2010) identified three themes in particular that promoted growth processes in the Palestinian political prisoners after surviving severely traumatic experiences, including: (1) engaging narratives, legends, and poetry; (2) sharing emotional expression and sense of belonging; and (3) harnessing spirituality and religion. Also the author highlighted that political prisoners revealed that they derived strength from collective identity and intergenerational legacies (Punamäki, 2010), for example, a participant stated,

I became aware that many people were imprisoned before me, and they could stand the torture and endure cruelty. I wanted to belong to them. (p. 37)

In this light, “second wave” research and thinking on resilience provides an insightful window into the complexities of human suffering and adaptation. On the one hand, people may present with severe mental health problems such as posttraumatic stress disorder and depression after being exposed to adversities. Simultaneously, they may grow and develop new coping strategies, talents, and harness intergenerational, spiritual, and cultural resources showing extraordinary determination.

In addition to focusing on cultural and intergenerational resources, “second wave” psychosocial research on resilience shifted from more of an individual-level focus toward prioritizing understandings of growth and adaptation within communities (Chasten, 2008). For example, in Wlodarczyk et al.’s (2016) cross-cultural quantitative study in the context of natural disasters, the authors demonstrated how across three distinct settings (e.g., Chile, Colombia, and Spain), several elements were positively associated with posttraumatic adaptation, including (1) participation in communal gatherings, (2) practicing religious rituals, and (3) engaging in community events. In a different study, Henry, Gorman-Smith, Schoeny, and Tolan (2014) argued for the importance of measuring community norms and social connection when mapping impacts of adversities on neighborhood-level social processes. These types of studies are consistent with a shift in thinking that place more of an interest in community, neighborhood, extended family and social ties, and the salience of place, culture, spirituality and holistic views on social ecologies. As Adger (2000) contemplated, “. . . resilience is related to stability, but is not clear whether this characteristic is always desirable” (p. 349). In the same article, Adger argued that “social resilience” requires “interdisciplinary understanding” and is “defined at the community level,” despite the multiple of dimensions of resilience and the importance of analysis at various scales (Adger, 2000, p. 349). In fact, “community resilience” has emerged as an important concept and area of focus in and of itself where researchers tend to emphasize place and social capital (e.g., Aldrich, 2012; Aldrich & Meyer, 2015; Cox & Perry, 2011; Norris, Stevens, Pfefferbaum, Wache, & Pfefferbaum, 2008); information, organized collective action, and community competence (e.g., Adger, Hughes, Folke, Carpenter, & Rockstorm, 2005; Cutter et al., 2008; Wyche et al., 2011); public policies affecting local infrastructures (e.g., Healy & Malhotra, 2009); and family, collective, and cultural resources (e.g., Agani, Landau, & Agani, 2010; Bonanno et al., 2010; Ungar, 2010). In this light, “second wave” thinking drastically moves from centering on a person’s or system’s ability in the first wave, to understanding growth processes and emphasizing culture, resources, neighborhood, community, and environment. As Ungar (2010) summarizes, “individual capacity is far less important than the quality of the child’s social ecology” (p. 425).

These “second wave” frameworks are helpful in understanding resilience in systems that are not at an equilibrium or where there is no obvious best ending point. Also “second wave” thinking problematized the process of “taking the concept of resilience from the ecological sciences and applying it to social systems” (Adger, 2000, p. 350). Instead, researchers began to argue more for the need for “critical engagement with normative questions of social difference and inequality,” and their relations to disasters (Cote & Nightingale, 2012, p. 478). Furthermore, humanistic psychologists such as Miller, Nash, and Fetty (2014) advocate for increased attention to current trends in multiculturalism, which seeks to challenge the ethnocentric principles and practices within psychology and engage social justice frameworks. Similarly, Hernandez-Wolfe, Killian, Engstrom, and Gangsei (2015) argue that in contexts of severe crisis, researchers should “continue to fully integrate cultural competence, diversity and/or intersectional frameworks in trauma work . . .” (p. 167). For example, when discussing support provided to torture survivors and the role of psychologists, the authors highlight how trauma therapy and intersectional social justice praxis go hand in hand and includes “addressing the multiple ways in which oppression plays out before, during and after torture, and in the context of recovery, including impact on the presence of or strength of resilience processes” (p. 165). From this perspective, resilience processes emerge in relation to oppression and trauma, and at contextually and culturally grounded intersections of human victimization and agency (Ungar, 2010).

In many ways, this complex conceptualization of the intersections between suffering and resilience circles back to Bühler’s ideas, where she upheld that “Life is always a becoming, a forward-moving process . . . [and] that humans do not merely react to the environment but perceive the world and take action based on the values that structure their perceptual field” (DeRobertis, 2006, p. 53). This leads us to the “third wave,” which we argue, focuses on understanding how resilience processes are shaped by human values, unequal social processes, and pathways of power (Cote & Nightingale, 2012; Lorenz, 2013; MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012; Robinson & Carson, 2016; Ungar, 2010; Weichselgartner & Kelman, 2014). In this light, a “third wave” approach would not only be concerned with apolitical dialectical relationships between human suffering and resilience but also with incorporating social justice perspectives on how resilience processes are marked by inequities and by the consequences of a history of the coloniality of power, oppression, and privilege (Atallah, 2016).

Centering at the Margins: Transdisciplinarity and Intersectionality for Critical Community Resilience Praxis

As discussed above, a second trend in resilience literature can be characterized as the “bounce forward” wave, focusing on growth after exposure to external stressors, though still heavily affected by previous notions of vulnerability and protection from the first wave. However, more recent trends in thinking across applied social sciences caution that a given factor may be protective in one situation, and yet can cause vulnerability in another, whereby the conditions of human suffering and resilience may be considered within almost paradoxical relations and are embedded in long-lasting societal problems and inequities (e.g., Kirmayer et al., 2009; Ungar, 2010; Wilkinson & Kleinman, 2016). Thus, yet another paradigm shift is underway, as “third wave” thinking develops. In this “wave,” resilience is not seen as something that describes the nature of a system, a person, or a thing. Rather, resilience is viewed as having a metaphorical quality—a name used to represent outcomes and processes that emerge in relation to intersecting difficulties where the focus of study and intervention should remain on people’s holistic experiences with human suffering (e.g., Atallah, 2016; Kirmayer et al., 2009; Shapiro, 2013). Despite the interconnectedness of suffering and resilience, the first and second waves of resilience thinking pay little attention to the social conditions that cause suffering, the social fabric that takes generations to build, and the multiplicity of peoples’ responses and how they intersect across diverse domains of society. Instead, the first and second waves of resilience thinking often engage frameworks drawing unmarked metaphors from physical and biomedical sciences while erroneously applying analysis across levels and scales (Atallah, 2016). However, “third wave” thinking emphasizes that transdisciplinary critical analysis is necessary to account for how disaster circumstances and human conditions that impact both suffering and resilience are determined by intersecting material and social realities and are marked by complex power relations such as coloniality (e.g., Atallah, 2016, 2017; Fernando, 2012; MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012).

For example, in an insightful qualitative study by Cox and Perry (2011) on resilience in rural communities after a wildfire in British Columbia, the authors demonstrated how adverse conditions, such as disasters, clearly “can cause distress but can also forge new or enhance existing attachments” with transformations in people’s relations to place, identity, and the very meaning of home and community (p. 406). The authors highlighted the importance of how community members responded to the complexity of their experiences of dislocation and suffering that came with returning to their homes after the fire and witnessing how their cherished landscapes had been destroyed, charred, and transformed. In fact, within the experiences of dislocation, emerged resilient responses from their embodied, situated selves and collective identities, which like their changed and charred landscapes, were in transformation as well. With their innovative ethnographic methods and discourse analysis, Cox and Perry showed how the “reorientation” of collective identity occurred not only along their burnt hillsides and within their destroyed homes but within contexts of gendered discourses and inequitable distributions of power that contributed to women participants being disenfranchised in relation to decision making of relief funds in particular. In their conclusions, Cox and Perry argued for the importance of increased power analysis and nuanced examinations of disaster recovery processes. The authors highlighted how the communities most affected by disasters themselves should be directly involved in determining the “new normal,” which requires that policymakers and disaster response plans include intentional engagements with the complexity of people’s disorientations and transformations in place and identity. These findings support Weichselgartner and Kelman’s (2014) position that increased investigations are needed to clarify “what resilience means in practice” (p. 257) and to map out roles of power relations in determining resilience, which requires innovative, qualitative, transdisciplinary research, and are typically neglected in disaster risk reduction and intervention (Donovan, 2017).

Centering at the Margins

Centering at the margins (e.g., Ford & Airhihenbuwa, 2010; Hardeman et al., 2016; Schulz & Mullings, 2006), a process born of critical race theory, is about shifting from mainstream groups’ perspectives toward incorporating knowledges of marginalized communities and is one of the core components of “third wave” resilience thinking and research. It is important to recognize, however, when using this concept that we are not speaking about numbers but about power relations. A sizeable majority group could be socially marginalized by groups with much smaller relative populations. Also, a specific group could be oppressed and marginalized within one set of power relations, yet privileged in relation to other axes of power (Prilleltensky, 2009). It is about focusing on power, using transdisciplinary and intersectional analyses to better understand and address how social groups have been differently positioned and conditioned by historical and ongoing asymmetrical arrangements of power. Drawing on Foucault, Collins, and Bilge (2016) highlight that power is not something that people “have” or “have not”—and it “is not something to be gained or lost . . . rather, power constitutes a relationship” (p. 28). Therefore, the emphasis should be on power relations and across diverse systems of marginalization. As an example, racism is better understood when exploring asymmetrical power relations not simply across different racialized groups but also across multiple axes of power (e.g., ethnicity/gender/class/sexuality/ability/etc.). In fact, intersectional scholarship shows how “racism and sexism gain meaning in relation to one another” (Collins & Bilge, 2016, p. 27).

“Centering at the Margins” means for us here at CIGIDEN that our “third wave” resilience approach when addressing hazards (e.g., major earthquakes and tsunamis, fires and floods—which will surely come) should not be on aiming to simply protect Chile or safeguard the status quo (first wave thinking). Likewise, our emphasis should not be primarily guided by the positive stance of responding to disasters within attempts to uncritically propel Chile forward toward growth and development (second wave thinking). Instead, we argue that human resilience is about contending with social suffering—collective anguish born from sudden catastrophes and intersecting long-lasting patterns of social inequality alike.

In fact, we agree with Burawoy (2005) that inequality is the most pressing issue of our time. Political and economic designs and principles passed down through historical and ongoing structural violence and coloniality have pushed inequities to extremes, evidenced in the recent Oxfam report demonstrating that “New estimates show that just eight men own the same wealth as the poorest half of the world” (Hardoon, 2017, p. 1). As Wilkinson and Kleinman (2016) ask,

What form of language is suited to convey the “violence” that is done to more than a billion people who are born into the rapidly expanding slum districts of the megacities of the developing world and who are largely abandoned to work at surviving in diseased environments overflowing with industrial detritus and foul human waste? How do we represent the losses and ungrounded lives of the world’s 50 million refugees? And how do we use the language and understanding we do possess in order to respond? (p. 6)

In this light, we argue that a resilience approach must include an emphasis on identifying “ecosocial pathways” (Krieger, 2008) that support people in collectively overcoming rampant structural violence and holding accountable the power relations and institutions that affect them (Atallah, 2016; Kirmayer et al., 2009; Norris et al., 2008; Wexler, DiFluvio, & Burke, 2009). Furthermore, “Centering at the margins” encompasses the empowerment of local communities that are marginalized (Freire, 1970), but at the transnational level, it means addressing the global patterns of structural violence rooted in coloniality that gives rise to the current polarizing social conditions of modernity, where “the maintenance of ‘lifestyle’ and pursuit of ‘consumer aspiration’ at one end of the globe are structurally implicated in the intensification of forces of destruction, violence, and oppression at the other” (Wilkinson & Kleinman, 2016, p. 10).

In summary, “third wave” thinking about resilience recognizes that on the one hand, social inequality can rip apart our social fabrics and collectively uproot our lives while placing us on trajectories toward unending cycles of violence and ruin. On the other, however, as theorized in second wave concepts such as PTG, social suffering can inspire healing and growth. “Second wave” thinking and research pushed understandings of resilience to include ideas of adaptation. Furthermore, influenced by some of humanistic psychology’s critiques of positive psychology, we have also discussed how resilience can be understood as grounded in dialectics between positive experiences and negative experiences. This led us to a conclusion that human resilience itself is born from a paradox that is embedded in our embodied experiences of social problems. In this light, “third wave” thinking understands and tolerates the fact that resilience resists overly exact definitions, in part, because of this paradox. Surely, resilience is much more than apolitical human adaptation after adversity, in part, because the conditions of disaster are always present, especially at the margins. As Clarke (2005) so powerfully explains “there is no such thing as context, all the conditions of the situation are in the situation” (p. 65). Therefore, whether focusing in at the local level of analysis or expanding out at the global level—current problems are always linked to deep-rooted social dynamics where past experiences leave their “marks upon the forms of culture and social practices through which we deal with the present” (Wilkinson & Kleinman, 2016, p. 17). We argue that disaster science should better “deal with the present” by beginning to increase their focus on identifying social and political determinants of human suffering, creating more holistic understandings of possible pathways for increasing equity, and engaging community resilience as a central organizing element. As Laska (2012) asserts, “a politically, economically, socially, and educationally ‘healthy’ community is a resilient community—to whatever risk comes along . . .” (p. 50). We theorize that resilience does, and should, resist overly precise definitions. In fact, we suggest that “resilience” is not an entity in and of itself. Instead, “resilience” should be conceptualized as an approach to better understanding social suffering and injustices while generating strategies for the promotion of healing and equity with nuanced analysis across patterns of power, social marginalizations, levels, and scales. As critical race theorists Ford and Airhihenbuwa (2010) argue, the very nature of “the collective experience of the margins gives birth to resilience and alternative ways of knowing” (p. 1396). Thus, rather than attempting to define resilience, in this article, we have outlined three “waves” as shifting paradigms, like authors before us (e.g., Atallah, 2016; Masten, 2015; Milliano et al., 2015; Richardson, 2002; Wright et al., 2013). In doing so, we hope to illuminate potentially useful ways of engaging with resilience metaphors and meanings (see Table 1, where we track the three “waves” swaying from protection, to adaptation, to transformation).

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Table 1.

Three “Waves” of Resilience Research: Toward Critical Community Praxis.

“Wave” of resilience thinking	Dominant discourse on resilience	Definition of physical and ecological resilience	Definition of psychological and social resilience	Strength of “wave”
First wave: “Bouncing back” disciplinary specific	Protection: Aims to explain and understand how systems bounce back after exposures to adversities, focusing on protecting functioning and the status quo	The potential for built infrastructures or ecosystems to maintain their functioning, or state of equilibrium, despite the presence of adverse events	The individual’s or group’s capacity for restoring functioning after an overwhelming experience or adversity	Helpful to physical systems, or when it is possible to identify a desired level of functioning or an optimum equilibrium that should be protected and persist over time
Second wave: “Bouncing forward” interdisciplinary	Adaptation: Attempts to explain and identify adaptive responses to constantly changing environments—bouncing forward after exposures to external adversities	The dynamic process of a system adapting its structure in response to episodic disturbances, while reorganizing to increase future adaptive potentials	The individual or group process of negotiating for and navigating toward, resources that promote adaption and growth after adversity	Helpful to systems or processes that are NOT at an equilibrium—that have NO obvious best ending point—and that require constant change, growth, or amelioration
Third wave: “Centering at the margins” transdisciplinary	Transformation: Engages liberation psychology, decolonial and critical race theories, including intersectional thinking across disciplines; re-centers understandings and solutions on embodied experiences of marginalized communities for transforming ecosocial systems toward social justice	Human resilience: Resists precise definitions and represents complex dialectics between human victimization and human agency as people face suffering in culturally- and contextually-grounded ways while transforming harmful situations in their lives and communities (which are marked by interlocking power relations—rooted in ecosocial systems, coloniality, historical trauma, and ongoing structural violence)		Helpful for social transformation and to account for differences in resilience across scales and across physical and social systems; affords communities more equitable opportunities to decision-making in pathways toward reaching their full potentials

Note. Adapted and extended from content and tables in Atallah (2016); Milliano, Faling, Clark-Ginsberg, Crowley, and Gibbons (2015); MacKinnon and Derickson (2012); Norris et al. (2008); Richardson (2002); Ungar, 2010; Wright, Masten, and Narayan (2013).

More specifically, emerging from this “third wave” paradigm that we have described above, we argue for applying what we call a Critical Community Resilience Praxis (CCRP). Furthermore, Atallah, Contreras, et al. (2018) have completed a study piloting CCRP with Mapuche indigenous communities in Chile. This study (Atallah, Contreras, et al., 2018), perhaps, can serve as a modest example of our attempting to apply CCPR within our work at CIGIDEN. In brief, Atallah, Contreras, et al. (2018) explain that CCRP aims to move from sentiment to strategy—toward fostering communities of inquiry that are accountable to, and effective for, promoting health and human rights while building genuine partnerships with marginalized groups. In particular, grounded in the critical pedagogy of Freire (1970) and inspired by three key principles of critical race theory adapted from Ford and Airhihenbuwa’s (2010) seminal article introducing a public health critical race praxis, we summarize CCRP as involving increased attention to (1) transdisciplinary commitments to social justice; (2) intersectionality and the interlocking power relations that interweave racism with other forms of oppression and social problems at local and global levels; (3) centering at the margins, building relationships toward directly prioritizing and privileging the voice(s) of marginalized individuals and groups with an emphasis on experiential and indigenous knowledges. CCRP involves these three core principles, which are highly interrelated concepts, rather than separate concrete steps to apply mechanistically.

Conclusions

Resilience is a concept that involves much more than systemic protection, adjustment, and adaptation in response to significant adversity, trauma, or disasters. In fact, we have argued that in developing “third wave” resilience thinking, research, and practice, we view the conditions of catastrophe as always being present, in distinctively salient ways at the social margins (see Table 1 for a brief outline of the three “waves” of resilience thinking that emerged from our literature review). Disasters are situations, determined by life-world conditions caused by interplays between material, psychological, and socioeconomic and political dynamics and are shaped by long-standing asymmetrical power relations. In many ways, the approach to disasters discussed in this article overlaps with Donovan’s (2017) conceptualization of disasters as assemblages—as “gatherings of relationships and topologies that are characterized by an event but are defined by their content and the distribution of power” (p. 48). Furthermore, when citing Gaillard and Mercer (2013), Donovan (2017) uses assemblage theory to argue that vulnerability and local knowledge are interconnected, where problematic and inequitable distributions of power between researchers, decision makers, and marginalized communities are linked to the communities’ very vulnerabilities. Therefore, when understanding resilience, we have argued for the importance of “centering at the margins” with a focus on transforming inequitable patterns of power through our CCRP, which involves transdisciplinary approaches, bottom-up participatory methods, intersectional analysis, and the inclusion of differently positioned stakeholders in all stages and across levels of resilience research, policy, and practice.

Central to our CCRP approach, we suggest humble and critical attempts to navigate through the paradoxical relations, whereby, although collective human anguish may devastate, separate, and alienate—suffering also can simultaneously inspire powerful psychological and sociopolitical transformations. To better understand resilience in ways that can hold this complexity with critical power analyses, we urge that more attention should be paid to mapping social problems endemic to postcolonial societies such as coloniality and associated historical trauma and racism, which are structured into everyday life. This situational mapping should occur grounded in transdisciplinary principles of social justice, examining the ways that individuals, households, neighborhoods, cities, regions, nations, and vulnerable communities across levels, struggle and counter the complex webs of challenges that mark their lives. Furthermore, we recognize how researchers, practitioners, and policymakers have long documented the roles of discrimination and unfair sociopolitical and economic practices in the production and maintenance of inequality and vulnerability (e.g., Cabieses et al., 2016; Goldman & Galea, 2014; Tol et al., 2011). Nevertheless, the ways in which people come together to face these structures and achieve transformative outcomes in their communities and in their lives have been notably neglected (Wexler et al., 2009).

With that said, in advocating for CCRP, we have no interest in drawing attention away from the important areas of study that examine how specific hazards, increasing salient with the onset of climate change, threaten lives and human social fabrics, and high-tech experimental research that creates valuable technologies, infrastructures, and life-saving innovations. However, in our response to sudden and long-lasting “disasters,” which so complicatedly and increasingly harm lives, resources, and rights, our CCRP approach is concerned with better appreciating how social problems affect peoples’ embodied experiences of human suffering, and how these conditions themselves shape our understandings of catastrophes, our epistemologies and methods, and our planning, practices, and policies. These recommendations are connected to some existing critiques of positive psychology, for example, by humanistic psychologists (e.g., Held, 2004; Hernandez-Wolfe et al., 2015; Miller et al., 2014) who have argued for increased attention to intersections of human suffering and resilience, and a focus on understanding cultural processes, social problems, and inequities.

Therefore, “third wave” resilience research approaches, such as our CCRP, would aim to directly examine and address power inequities within the research process itself, seeking to fashion responses to social ecologies of adversity grounded in perspectives of marginalized groups with deeper contemplation of what disasters “are,” and what they “do” to people, to resources, to knowledge production, and ultimately—to a community’s access to wellness and human rights. Thus, part of CCRP includes the prioritization of affording community members with various entry points and ways of engagement, addressing the fact that there is no lack of academics, psychologists, and policymakers involved in resilience research and practice, for example, locally here for us in Chile, and in many settings internationally. Instead, there is a lack of pathways for the people who are most directly affected by social problems to actively participate in generating understandings and creating solutions to be able to dismantle the systems that perpetuate inequality.

A major limitation of the current article is in our contributions to the dividing up of resilience thinking, action, and scholarship into three waves and our privileging of academics as being the key founders of the specific swells. Although, as other authors did before us (e.g., Atallah, 2016; Masten, 2015; Milliano et al., 2015; Richardson, 2002; Wright et al., 2013) we too found it helpful to articulate qualitatively distinct paradigms of resilience as unique “waves” that have emerged in the literature over the past several decades. This periodization, however, does risk situating specific academics (mainly middle-class Global North writers) as the central historical agents. This periodization also risks negating the contributions of a multiplicity of differently positioned writers, activists, artists, community organizers, intellectuals, and far-reaching collectives at the margins who engage their agency, courage, and brilliance in groundbreaking efforts toward better understanding and addressing intersections of human suffering and oppression. Therefore, our focus in this article on using language that centers and describes academic authors’ works as key developments in the “discovery” of constructs useful to our understanding fits nicely into academic norms of the ownership of ideas and cultural capital (Collins & Bilge, 2016). Brodsky and Cattaneo (2013) argue for “protecting and reclaiming a proper community psychology perspective on resilience and empowerment” (p. 335). Although we find the authors’ transconceptual model linking resilience and empowerment timely and informative, we disagree that these constructs have slipped into conceptual ambiguity and require academics to protect, explain, and rediscover their true meanings. We understand, consistent with Freire’s (1970) pedagogy, that diverse and astute knowledge about, and action to promote, empowerment, and resilience, has existed long before the terms were ever “discovered” by Western academics in the English language.

Therefore, part of CCRP should acknowledge, that as we focus on tracking institutional historical narratives of resilience published in English, we effectively are “disciplining” resilience while privileging the agency of academics and English-speaking authors with advanced degrees. As MacKinnon and Derickson (2012) warned, we agree that “the success of resilience in ‘colonizing multiple arenas of governance’ reflects its ideological fit with neoliberalism” (p. 257). Uncritical engagement with resilience theory and intervention could actually risk our contributing to maintaining “existing forms of social hierarchy and control” (MacKinnon & Derickson, 2012, p. 262), while continuing oppressive epistemologies that, although they may seek to “incorporate” experiences of disenfranchised groups, they still work to systematically deny access of marginalized individuals and communities to be recognized as the powerful knowledge-creators that they are and have always been. Part of CCRP requires that we decenter the academy as the main protagonist in the story as we generate ideas, practices, and policies. Instead, part of a CCRP approach should focus on creating critical understanding and action that account for the messy trajectories of resilience-related thought to more genuinely open spaces to the voices of marginalized communities, indigenous perspectives, and the impactful knowledge of multi-stressed families on the frontlines.