Humanities For Resilience

Development and sustainability, if they are to mean anything, must include an understanding of how communities endure, abide, and even flourish in times of adversity. Resilience is at the heart of these activities. The World Humanitarian Summit (2016) echoes these calls, insisting upon collective endeavour to "leverage the strengths and abilities of affected people and communities affected by crises". Resilience is more than developing capacities to absorb shocks to communities, or systems, but is also about embedding resilience practices and dynamics in everyday activities. Currently the first approach remains the priority of international development aid and policies on resilience and so focus on preserving the status quo and biological life. However NGOs and researchers view this limited framework as a lost opportunity to "restore humanity by protecting and enabling people as the primary agents of their own responses to crisis" (World Humanitarian Summit). This network responds to their concerns and aims to address how resilience can be fostered by better understanding what makes 'ways of living' resilient. Focusing on a 'ways of living' approach to resilience, the network is an exploration of the shared human experience of resilience. A 'ways of living' perspective additionally prioritises 'bottom-up' formations of resilience, operating as a network of practice. The purpose of the network is to understand which resilient experiences, interactions, moves, and actions 'create value' in diverse and complex social worlds.

The network is global in its reach and activities, operating in the UK, Zambia, Pakistan and Lebanon, with participants from Europe, North and South America, Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Middle East. Shared leadership, the co-production of knowledge, and joint creation of outputs between participants are built into the structure and practices of the network. The 1st workshop (Birmingham) examines the conceptual basis for resilience by examining where and how resilience has been utilised in policy and practices from a variety of disciplinary and practitioner perspectives, including from engineering, environmental sciences and the social sciences. We will explore how international development concerns have moved from sustainability towards resilience. It will highlight the positive and negative consequences this has had across cities, policies and sectors. The 2nd workshop (Zambia), examines the targets of resilience: minority and marginalised communities. In this workshop we explore who is being made resilient and why. We will report firsthand on the work of our partner - VMM. The 3rd (Lebanon) examines 'practical humanities' by focusing on resilient places - and where resilience is absent. It looks at resilience in transitory places as well as permanent, historical, and 'pop-up' communal sites. The 4th (Pakistan) examines the type of interventions in the name of resilience. This addresses the artefacts and outputs associated with resilience, such as dialogue, heritage, art, literature and dance. This workshop explores whether the properties of certain objects hold 'resilience' and how they generate resilience in others. The workshop activities will be linked and ongoing through cross-circulation of the workshops' findings, and papers and debates developed through online discussion and across our partners' existing communication channels. A closing plenary (Birmingham) will bring together all members of the network to develop and showcase how, as a field of disciplines, the humanities contribute towards understanding and building resilience in international development aid settings. Finally, the network, through incorporating a self-evaluation mechanism, will explore how networks themselves contribute towards resilience. Together the network's activities explore the human experience of resilience, and how 'ways of living' are made or become resilient, and what can be done to facilitate them.

Collaboration and the co-production of research frameworks, priorities, and outputs from the outset ensures this network will impact on important conversations about the humanities' role in resilience and how they can be utilised in shaping overseas development aid agendas in LMICs. Doing so when the field of resilience in the humanities is still in its embryonic stages will allow for the crystallisation of a research agenda that allies the intellectual priorities of the academic community with the practical requirements of the international development sector. The network will have particular impact in Zambia, Pakistan & Lebanon because of the intense and substantial role of partners in those ODA countries. It achieves this via the activities of the network, its proposed outputs, and through future planning.

The network harnesses academic and stakeholder expertise in pursuit of objectives that are complementary to and expand upon policy developments in the UN with regard to development goals and specifically the World Humanitarian Summit (2016); at the national level, with governments' counter-terrorism and disaster management policies; and at the local government level, with objectives in building community cohesion and prosperity. The workshop programme (see Case for Support) is designed to see the engagement in 'through-life' policy terms - critiquing and developing the conceptual underpinnings, the desired end states, the targets, and the nature of interventions. The workshop activities (discussion, debate, shared experiences, field visits and networking) are designed to create new ways of imagining and practicing resilience, and also to foster and evaluate resilience among participants. As a result of participation members will have 1) collaborated to find new ways of conceptualising their activities so that they are empowered in international development agenda negotiations; 2) the opportunity to redesign, reimagine and develop their activities in light of the workshops' discussions and findings; and 3) the opportunity to foster new relationships, future collaborations and activities not otherwise imagined without the transnational and interdisciplinary membership of the network. LMIC partner countries therefore specifically see impact in terms of the enhanced resilience of the civic organisations through their involvement in the network and consequently for the communities and peoples they serve.

The outputs are designed to enhance impact in four key audiences: academic, public, policy-makers, and practitioners in international development. A vital resource for researchers will be the Ways Forward research agenda. This will be for publication in a major peer-reviewed inter-disciplinary research journal (such as Humanity). A special edition of a peer-reviewed journal, such as Resilience, complements the agenda-setting outputs, allowing for a refinement and detailed expansion of the core ideas presented in the workshops. These outputs co-produced by network members will enhance research and expertise within LMIC member countries. Producing a grant bid for future collaborative research is important to sustaining the network in the longer term. Public engagement in Zambia, Pakistan & Lebanon is facilitated through the online contributions that are aimed at non-specialists (guest blogging via well-established web-sites) and through in-country radio and print media engagements. The policy sphere is included by inviting core funding bodies and civil servants to the final plenary and via the briefing paper. The briefing paper and blog pieces will be further disseminated in the workshop countries via network members existing communication channels. The practitioner world is directly engaged in the workshops and through the outline review of members' humanities oriented resilience projects. Combined these outputs enhance understanding and practice among LMIC and international practitioners, researchers and policy makers.