Voices from the OxHRF - Beyond Resilience

[EL Laskar, Coordinator of the OxHRF] At the launch of the Oxford Human Rights Festival in March, Dr Sana Murrani, Associate Professor (Spatial Practice) and Founder of the Displacement Studies Research Network at Plymouth University invited us to join a discourse around the limitations of resilience frameworks and assessments within the humanitarian sector.  As we recognise and celebrate resilient systems are we failing to see their limitations? Dr Murrani writes ‘celebrating the positivity of the resilient isn’t by itself a powerful enough lens to delineate the transformations that people can achieve individually and collectively after the trauma of displacement.’ 

Carey Marks, Creative Associate 2019, Mapping Creative Recovery

Moving from resilience into thriving by Dr Sana Murrani

Rhetoric around climate disasters, wars and conflict, and economic deprivation has moved on from describing the vulnerable to celebrating the positivity of the resilient. The UN definition of resilience relates the concept to the particular capabilities of cities and communities to tackle chronic stresses (such as high unemployment, crime and violence rates etc) and acute shocks (whether natural or man-made) and that one size resilience doesn’t fit all. 

Resilience is an ambiguous concept and does not stand alone without it being related to something or someone, cities or communities. It is difficult to operationalise and quantify without considering its manifestations under specific conditions in specific contexts. From an urban, architectural and spatial practice point of view, resilience should be discussed through the ways in which the trauma of stresses and shocks conditions people, communities and cities.   

But then we are back to the problem of the ambiguous meaning of this concept. In a research project on mapping the meaning of home in displacement that I conducted last year and a current project in collaboration with Oxford University Archaeology we were more interested in knowing how refugees and asylum seekers in the UK are overcoming the trauma of displacement by tapping into their material culture and making home in diaspora beyond the point of survival and found that the concept of thriving extends the meaning of resilience. Sorry to be adding to the rhetoric here, yet I feel that the move from describing the vulnerable to celebrating the positivity of the resilient isn’t by itself a powerful enough lens to delineate the transformations that people can achieve individually and collectively after the trauma of displacement. 

Instead of defining thriving, I will give you an example of it. One of the participants in my project, a young lad from Gaza, Palestine, who then still had his asylum case under review, had just got into the country, unsure about what is going on, dispersed to a city that he had no clue about, living in shared Home Office managed accommodation with people he’d never met before, yet he had a look on his face, one of determination. He took the mapping project very seriously. Over the course of the six months field research, we mapped memories of home and homeland and represented them in architectural models and maps with collaged photographs where each participant put together his/her own representations. 

Mohammed’s piece was the most elaborate map. It takes the viewer into a journey through Mohammed’s happy yet disrupted childhood and at the end of the project Mohammed knew what he was going to be doing next. 

He said to me: I’m going to do a Masters in International Relations and Politics and I want to start a charity that supports new arrivals to cities and will use the mapping method to help people like me find their place in this new world. 

Dr Sana Murrani joins the Human Rights Festival via Skype

Soon after, Mohammed was granted refugee status and was the first refugee to work on the bid that awarded Plymouth the City of Sanctuary status. He then moved to Edinburgh where he is now doing a Masters in International Relations and Politics, and is working with a local refugee support NGO as their ambassador in the city. He has also been nominated for this year’s National Refugee Week ambassadors where he will be receiving an award for his outstanding work in the community. This is thriving beyond resilience and beyond survival. 

[EL Laskar].  Dr Murrani had been in self isolation at the launch and joined us via Skype.

She guided us into a welcomed inquisitive space and encouraged us to scratch beneath the veneer of resilience. Is it enough to celebrate survival stories or resilience stories? Does the resilience lens ignore or limit a perspective or responsibility into human fulfilment? What support systems are needed to help people go beyond their resilience? As we continue with these blogs we will meet one particular group of Rohingya women who have begun to thrive. The Oxford Human Rights Festival thanks @sanamurrani for her support this year. To read the final report from Dr Murrani's research click here.