This paper problematizes how scholars understand the relation between resilience and justice.
Critical and applied scholarship tends to dismiss resilience as a neoliberal barrier to justice, or assume it necessarily advances justice outcomes. Instead, drawing on collaborative fieldwork with Miami-based social and climate justice organizers, we explore how resilience is mobilized in contextually-specific struggles against racialized vulnerability and insecurity.
Reading across literatures in political geography, cultural geography, and Black geographies, we highlight absurd and inconsistent expressions of resilience in our collaborators’ justice advocacy work.
A focus on the absurd directs attention to the way diverse practices of resilience emerge from ‘spaces out of joint,’ where modernity’s universalizing promises of betterment run aground against long histories of racial violence that secure White futurity.
Our community collaborators ironically mobilize and reject resilience in strategic ways that reflect their struggles to create and defend place against the racialized extraction of value, disinvestment, and displacement.
This creates a variegated geography of resilience and justice that is irreducible to predetermined critical or applied analytical frameworks. Instead, we emphasize the need to embrace the absurd destabilization of conventional analytical categories, in order to open space for new problems and responses for collaborative research.
