CSS Lecture Series "After Sustainability"Lecture by Prof. Christer Pursiainen, 24th January, 6:00 PMWhat is 'resilience' - and what could it be? Lessons from theory and practice

12 January 2024, by CSS

Photo: unsplash

We are very pleased to announce that Prof. Christer Pursiainen (Professor of Societal Security and Safety at the UiT The Arctic University of Norway and Research Fellow at the CSS) will contribute to our Lecture Series with a talk dealing with "What is 'resilience' - and what could it be? Lessons from theory and practice".

When: Wednesday, January 24th, 6:00 PM (Berlin time)

Where: Gorch-Fock-Wall 3, Room 1021, 20354 Hamburg. 

The talk and the Q&A will be in English.

Abstract:

Resilience is the buzzword of our time. While the term has a long history, it only gained academic popularity in the 2010s. Currently, resilience is studied in several disciplines, and it has numerous practical applications. This has led to definitional ambiguities about the meaning of resilience in different contexts.

This talk provides a concise overview of the concept of resilience, its history and today’s applications. Prof. Pursiainen presents major developments in resilience research during the last two decades by examining societal, organizational, technological, ecological, macroeconomical, and psychological approaches to resilience.

Among other things, the talk addresses a watershed division in resilience theories, namely the question of whether resilience is about recovery after an external shock or adaptation to change. Further, the talk focuses in particular on the question of whether resilience can be measured and how. Finally, it raises the issue of how transdisciplinary learning between different resilience concepts might provide a key to develop the field further in its variety of application areas. For discussion, not addressed in the current talk but rather as a future task, it is proposed to discuss in the gathering how the concepts of sustainability and resilience are related to each other.

You can find the poster for the talk here [pdf].

You can find more up to date information on the lecture series here.