'More-than-human’ resilience(s)? Enhancing community in Finnish forest farms

Herman, A. (2016) 'More-than-human’ resilience(s)? Enhancing community in Finnish forest farms. Geoforum, 69. pp. 34-43. ISSN 0016-7185 doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.12.005

Abstract/Summary

Community resilience is widely understood as a critical element in the relatively under-explored concept of social resilience. Through engaging with ‘more-than-human’ literatures, a more expansive view of the ‘social’ emerges, which repositions individuals as networked and agency as relational. This moves resilience away from its hegemonic positioning as a neoliberal strategy of individualisation and responsibilisation, with it instead emerging as an everyday ‘doing’ embedded in the human and non-human networks of relationality that we form and are formed by. The paper develops this socio-cultural conceptualisation through an original and empirically grounded discussion of Finnish farm communities and the role of the forest in developing, maintaining and enhancing these essential, connective assemblages. Resilience becomes conceptualised as dynamic, uneven, multiple and contextual performances or resiliences. While this further problematizes the comparative measurement and operationalisation of resilience, its networked and relational nature arguably offers a more inclusive and ethically grounded concept that, furthermore, negates the socio-ecological divide that persists in resilience thinking.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/57620
Identification Number/DOI	10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.12.005
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Archaeology, Geography and Environmental Science > Department of Geography and Environmental Science
Publisher	Elsevier
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