“Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared”

Abstract

Rather than concerning ourselves with ''governing trauma'' we should instead be concerned with how trauma has come to govern us. Trauma talk now comes naturally, and the article explores what all this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically, especially in the context of the relationship between security and anxiety. The management of trauma and anxiety has become a way of mediating the demands of an endless security war: a war of security, a war for security, a war through security. The article therefore seeks to understand the concept of trauma and the proliferation of discourses of anxiety as ideological mechanisms deployed for the security crisis of endless war; deployed, that is, as a training in resilience. Trauma is less an issue of memory or the past and more a question of building resilience for the future. The language of trauma and anxiety, and the training in resilience that is associated with these terms, weds us to a deeply conservative mode of thinking.

Articulating artfulness: Exploring the ecological potential of creative conversation

“…Vulnerability also performs a resistance to the "resilience" concept that has come to dominate all manner of public discourse, from economy to ecology, but whose use has been variously critiqued for the ways in which it secures and ensures the maintenance of the neoliberal status quo and alienates people from politics and visions of the future (e.g., Bracke, 2016;Neocleous, 2012). If the resilience trope demands or creates an individualised, robust subject, always capable of "bouncing back," then vulnerability brings to the fore a very different kind of subject, one which is not only susceptible but receptive (Butler et al, 2016).…”

In the service of a higher good: Resilience of academics under managerial control

“…Stressing individual survival over collective responsibility and government involvement ideologically associates resilience with neoliberalism (Welsh, 2014). Hence, while supporting the adaptation of individuals and communities in a changing world, the resilience discourse works to conceal, through individualisation and the normalisation of uncertainty, the structures of power and injustice that create the uncertainty and adversity in the first place (Hornborg, 2009; Joseph, 2013; Neocleous, 2012; O’Malley, 2010). Consequently, this depoliticises oppression, as the individual or local community becomes responsible for thriving under it without an opportunity to overthrow the underlying political regime that has originally created this oppression.…”

Imagining socioecological transformation: An analysis of the Welsh Government’s policy innovations and orientations to the future

“…The concept of the Anthropocene, and associated ideas such as planetary boundaries and safe operating spaces, are often associated with narratives of resilience and security (Randalls, 2015), and the reconfiguration of public life around temporal registers of uncertainty, adjustment and repair (Barnett, 2015). Alongside a consensual setting in which environmental problems are staged as universally threatening, the contemporary condition is one woven through with fear and danger, creating "ecologies of fear" (Swyngedouw, 2013 p. 3;Neocleous, 2012). Following Badiou (2008), Swyngedouw argues that this mobilization of the future as a universal threat is a kind of opium for the masses, whereby "the nurturing of the promise of a more benign retrofitted climate ("resilience") exhausts the horizon of our aspirations and imaginations" (Swyngedouw, 2013 p. 3).…”