Resilience Otherwise: Ambivalence, Care, and the Cultural Politics of Endurance under Neoliberal Capitalism

Authors

• Vered Ben David, Carleton University; Zefat Academic CollegeFollow

ORCID

0000-0002-8792-2053

Keywords

resilience, neoliberalism, cultural critique, affect, moral economy, responsibilization, inequality

Document Type

Essay

Abstract

Over the past two decades, resilience has emerged as a central cultural keyword circulating across psychology, public policy, education, labor, and popular culture. Frequently celebrated as a marker of strength and adaptability, resilience has also become entangled with neoliberal forms of governance that relocate responsibility for managing insecurity onto individuals and communities. This analysis offers a critical cultural account of resilience as an ambivalent formation that operates simultaneously as a lived capacity for adaptation and as a normative demand that responsibilizes subjects under conditions of structural precarity. Drawing on scholarship in developmental psychology, political economy, and critical cultural theory, the article traces the movement of resilience from its descriptive origins in ecology and psychology to its contemporary deployment across state policy, labor and education, consumer culture, and affective narratives of optimism and self-overcoming. The analysis shows how resilience is mobilized to normalize inequality and ongoing crisis, even as it remains grounded in everyday practices of endurance, care, and collective survival.

Rather than rejecting resilience outright, the article proposes a critical reframing that situates resilience within infrastructures of care, solidarity, and survival-as-resistance. Approached as a contested cultural terrain rather than a settled ideal, resilience emerges as a site where adaptation and critique, endurance and transformation, remain in tension. In doing so, the article contributes to interdisciplinary conversations on affect, responsibilization, and the cultural politics of endurance under contemporary capitalism.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Ben David, Vered (2026) "Resilience Otherwise: Ambivalence, Care, and the Cultural Politics of Endurance under Neoliberal Capitalism," Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis: Vol. 4: Iss. 4, Article 2.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.55533/2765-8414.1161
Available at: https://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/emancipations/vol4/iss4/2