The Question of Resilience

This book originates in a symposium held to inaugurate a Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen. The title of the collaborative research project is Waterworlds. Natural environmental disaster and social resilience in anthropological perspective.

The ongoing processes of environmental change that are already unsettling local social communities as well as scientists are the starting point for the question of social resilience, which is addressed in the book. Members of the Waterworlds team as well as international scholars who contributed to the symposium here seek to identify both the acualities of resilience in circumstances where people are already met by environmental threats, and the conceptual challenges that the notion poses to analysts.

The analysts are anthropologists, geographers and a social epidemiologist, who are not aiming at producing any single answer to the question, but rather at reflecting on the feasibility of the concept of resilience in the social sciences.