Reframing Resilience

Abstract

In this chapter we explore notions of temporality, subjectivity and agency in our analysis of the ways in which young adults make sense of the way social and economic shifts play out in their personal, professional and family lives. We call on data from a dialogic workshop conducted in 2018 to examine the ways participants cope with the disrupted nexus between education and work. We find that the widespread experience of precarious work required new ways of thinking about the present in relation to the future, a distinguishing feature of the new adulthood. Temporality was a key motif within conversations about the difficulty of making a secure life for themselves and their children. The work to make sense of fractured life course storylines was further aggravated by performativity pressures generated via engagement with social media. A labour of comparison infiltrated everyday life. The mismatch between past expectations, present realities and unpredictable futures produced feelings of anxiety, and a sense of being wronged by history. The tension between uncertain personal futures, and looming climate futures produced an abrasive powerlessness, dealt with by attention to performing well in the present. A new form of agency was required to deal with the accompanying existential challenge. To craft an intelligible life, the subject must make meaning adhere despite a disrupted logic of progression through time. In this effort resilience may be re-framed as the ability to make daily and future time meaningful without reliance on traditional discourses and timelines, and the willingness to accept contradictions and ambiguities as opportunities for emergence. Agency might then also be reconceptualised as the exertion of poise and versatility in the face of emerging circumstances. Resilience may be re-framed as an aesthetics of life-making in the everyday, requiring the employment of those micro-strategies which help one to live with the present despite an uncertain future.