Resilient Societies-Early Career Research Symposium for the Humanities and Social Sciences 2022

Date: 6-8 September 2022

Location: Virtual Event

MWS Delhi is co-organizing this symposium together with the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), DWIH, and ICAS:MP.

About the symposium:

Resilience – a term once again highlighted in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and current debates surrounding the impact of climate change and violent conflict – constitutes a highly ambiguous concept, one that nevertheless forms one of the most important needs for societies, impacting international conflict and cooperation, national and local politics, individual and household behavior as well as social interaction. The ambiguity of the term rests on its paradoxical qualities: It depicts robustness, stability, solidity, sustainability; at the same time, its pursuit frequently requires fluidity, flexibility, coping, adaptation, and adjustment. Its connotations with durability tend to rest on change. Similarly, its relationship with efficiency is complex. In turn, when employed at the societal level, we need to account for the demands various types of resilience place on different aspects of social organization. Improving resilience in global supply chains, for instance, may help in creating robustness in the face of economic shocks, and may even facilitate ecological sustainability. But it may come with the price of high levels of inflation – and job losses in less prosperous parts of the world – that destabilize household-level resilience, and in doing so may eventually affect global stability both in economic and in political terms which, in turn, may hamper global efforts for cooperation. Given the complexities involved, the permutations of possible effects within and across societies tend to be overwhelming. Keeping in mind the complexities and ambiguities in studying resilience, we invite paper presentations from across the humanities and social sciences as well as related disciplines, and inter-disciplinary approaches. We focus on six main areas of inquiry, though approaches that explore links to different topics are welcome: Public Health, Governance, Crisis & Conflict, Urbanity, Sustainability, and Poverty, inequality and development.

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