Kick-Off Workshop: conceptualizing and operationalizing resilience

To kick off the RESILIENCE project, we will organize a brainstorm workshop to explore the concept of ‘resilience’.

The aim of the workshop is to explore and discuss the validity and feasibility of ‘resilience’ as a concept for understanding and addressing how neighborhoods and residents deal with chronic urban violence and insecurity in Latin America.

The RESILIENCE project aims to use ‘grass roots resilience’ in a critical sense: processual, multilevel, power-sensitive, as an alternative to prevailing framing of resilience within a neoliberal discourse. Therefore, in this workshop, we will explore how to define resilience and how to relate the concept to conceptualizations of urban violence and insecurity, and related concepts such as fear, resistance, memory, and governance. We will then reflect on how to apply ‘resilience’ in designing and conducting research, especially in the context of ethnographic fieldwork. Finally, the concept will be considered in the context of our three field-sites: Guatemala City, Medellín, and Rio de Janeiro.

The theoretical and practical reflections from this brainstorm will be shared publicly after the workshop.

The workshop will be moderated by Prof. Dr. Kees Koonings and is set up as a round table meeting with the project members and invited scholars with differing areas of expertise regarding urban violence in Latin America.

There are limited seats available, but those interested in attending the workshop can contact Kees Koonings to ask whether there are any available spaces.