social resilience Archives

A women sitting on what appears to be a metal bunk with no mattress in a prison cell. A handwritten label at the bottom of the image reads "feel unworthly locked up" (sic?)

JENNY RABODZEENKO Allstate KELLY COSTELLO Panorama Innovation Through Designing Your Future workshops at Cook County Jail in Chicago as part of WIND (Women Initiating New Directions) programming, we have had the chance to connect with incarcerated women awaiting trial. From these interactions with women who, despite tremendous life adversity, are extremely resilient, we have realized that the notion of resilience is a double-edged sword. While heroic, the myth of individual resilience, in the context of criminal justice, may simultaneously allow society to abdicate responsibility for those in jail. In this PechaKucha, we propose a reframe, from individual to social resilience, which holds us all accountable. Through understanding the many types of adversity faced by at-risk women throughout their lives, especially mental health and substance abuse challenges, we show historical and current precedents for more humane solutions that enhance individual resilience via social support. The presentation concludes with a call to...

Line drawing of teenagers tanking selfies and the screens of their phones showing social media profiles

JULIAN GOPFFARTH Stripe Partners REBECCA JABLONSKY Google1 CATHERINE RICHARDSON Stripe Partners Virtual worlds have been central to an imagined future in which advances in technology propel new social practices. The recent focus within the technology industry on the “metaverse” is the latest iteration of imagined, utopian virtual worlds which have continually surfaced in literature, film, product development, and more since the 1960s. One might say that the concept of virtual worlds is resilient—but do these proposed virtual worlds actually make society more resilient? We argue that despite their endurance, these concepts present a deterministic vision of a singular future towards which humanity is inevitably progressing, revoking the agency, desires and resilience expressed by people today in their everyday realities. Building on original ethnographic research conducted with 31 teenagers in China, Germany and the US as well as past anthropological work on using ethnography to anticipate the future and teenage online...