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. 

Work in progress: memoryscape of post-recovery space

This Thursday sees the latest in our Work in Progress seminar series. The speaker is Dr Sana Murrani from the University of Plymouth. She will be speaking about the process of research and findings in her participatory mapping project, Creative Recovery, which looked at the journeys of everyday life of home and homeland of 12 refugees and asylum seekers in the UK where the construct of memory overlapped the construct of home and the maps became the journeys to post recovery space or memoryscapes. These memoryscapes contributed to the self-perceived recovery from trauma and loss. Sana’s research, which straddles the fields of spatial memory and cognition, critical urban theory and spatial practice, is focused on the understanding of the creative ways in which people respond to conflict and displacement spatially.

The seminar is from 16.30 to 18.00 on Thursday, 24 October in JHB307.