Becky Heaver

Uniting Resilience Research and Practice With an Inequalities Approach

The concept of resilience has evolved, from an individual-level characteristic to a wider ecological notion that takes into account broader person–environment interactions, generating an increased interest in health and well-being research, practice and policy. At the same time, the research and policy-based attempts to build resilience are increasingly under attack for responsibilizing individuals and maintaining, rather than challenging, the inequitable structure of society. When adversities faced by children and young people result from embedded inequality and social disadvantage, resilience-based knowledge has the potential to influence the wider adversity context. Therefore, it is vital that conceptualizations of resilience encompass this potential for marginalized people to challenge and transform aspects of their adversity, without holding them responsible for the barriers they face. This article outlines and provides examples from an approach that we are taking in our research and practice, which we have called Boingboing resilience. We argue that it is possible to bring resilience research and practice together with a social justice approach, giving equal and simultaneous attention to individuals and to the wider system. To achieve this goal, we suggest future research should have a co-produced and inclusive research design that overcomes the dilemma of agency and responsibility, contains a socially transformative element, and has the potential to empower children, young people, and families.

Building resilience through group visual arts activities: Findings from a scoping study with young people who experience mental health complexities and/or learning difficulties

Summary This article reports research that aimed to identify and evaluate potential resilience benefits of visual arts interventions for young people with complex needs. The study involved a review of the ‘arts for resilience’ literature and a case study of 10 weekly resilience-building arts workshops for 10 young people experiencing mental health complexities and/or learning difficulties. Findings We found a significant existing evidence-base linking visual arts practice to individual and community resilience, across disciplinary fields including art therapy, social work, community health, visual arts practice and geographies of health. Visual art activities were utilised to both educate young people about resilience and enhance young people’s overall resilience. Qualitative research material developed from the case study shows that even short-term visual arts interventions can impact on young people’s resilience – crucially, participation was extremely beneficial to young people’s sense of belonging and ability to cope with difficult feelings (topics which arose repeatedly during interview, focus group discussion and observation). Applications Our review and findings from this small case study provide some initial insights into the resilience benefits of participation in visual arts activities. This, combined with the resilience-based practice framework presented here, could aid the effective targeting of interventions for social workers and others working with young people with complex needs. Alongside this research paper, an arts for resilience practice guide has been produced by the project team (including young people). It contains instructions on how to conduct a range of practical visual arts activities that we identified as being resilience-promoting.

Communities of practice in community-university engagement: Supporting co-productive resilience research & practice

For the last 10 years, we have been exploring Communities of Practice (CoPs) as both a conceptual and practical approach to community-university engagement, most notably in our work on resilience with children, young people and families. We have found elements of CoP theory and practice to be a powerful and pragmatic way to approach many of the tensions, considerations and nuances of this work. This chapter focuses on our experiences (academics and community partners) of running a CoP with a diverse membership that meets monthly to discuss, disagree and debate about resilience research and practice. We outline those theoretical areas we have found invaluable in getting us started with CoPs, but we also discuss where we have found ourselves needing to develop our own approaches to help us with the complex circumstances and systems, rather than within one single domain. We identify a series of paradoxes that we have to navigate in making our CoP work—particularly the tensions between being social but intentional in our practice, and how we can disentangle the blend of participation and learning that occurs in our CoP space. We conclude by turning to the future, to consider the conceptual development that might be helpful in this area and to reflect on the potential of supporting co-productive research and practice in pursuing social goals through communities of practice.