Cemore Director Monika Büscher is giving a keynote at the Mobile Cultures of Disasters Conference in Adelaide.

A Mobile Utopia of Radically Reflexive Resilience

Since the 1992 Earth Summit, 4.4 billion people or 64% of the world’s population have been affected by disasters, and the number of ‘loss events’ has more than doubled (UNISDR 2012, Munich RE 2015). Resilience concepts respond to these pressures, but the meanings, policies, and practices of resilience are ambiguous, on the one hand enacting a neoliberal individualisation of responsibility, on the other new forms of cosmopolitan resilience with ambitions for ‘respectful reciprocity, self-governance, improvisation and mutual aid’ (Shani 2016, Crawford et al 2013:6, Meier 2015). In this talk I mobilise utopia as method for a speculative sociology of radically reflexive resilience, following Levitas (2013), to critically unearth dynamics of inequality, to reflect on what it means to be resiliently human, and to describe examples of making resilient socio-technical futures with diverse collectives. I explore what it might mean to ‘get relational’ and how forms of ‘reflexive doubt’ (Beck 1997, Cash 2016) and radical reflexivity (Pollner 1991) might support ‘good’ resilience.