This program addresses "What is resilience? Whose resilience? and resilience to what?" as its basic research questions with direct relevance to international health and social policy, focusing on both theory and practical applications.
Resilience is a multi-dimensional construct defined as
the capacity of individuals, families, communities, systems and institutions to anticipate, withstand and/or judiciously engage with catastrophic events and/or experiences, actively making meaning out of adversity, with the goal of maintaining "normal" function without fundamentally losing identity (Almedom 2007).
This definition originates from more than two decades of primary interdisciplinary research, scholarship and participatory learning with women of child-bearing age in the context of their families, communities, and formal or informal social institutions in different countries including Afghanistan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Tanzania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This definition was proposed at the International Resilience Workshop - Talloires 2007 which launched this program. The workshop abstracts and papers were published in the inaugural special issue of the international peer-reviewed journal African Health Sciences, guest-edited by Astier Almedom with grant support from the Christensen Fund.
Beyond a significant record of publication in scholarly academic and practitioner-oriented journals, this concept of resilience was discussed at the inaugural scientific conference of the Resilience Alliance, for which Dr. Almedom was selected by an international panel of scientists to serve as one of the key speakers.
Other definitions of resilience also continue to illuminate. Most notably, resilience theory in trans-disciplinary sciences has conceptualized resilience as a basis for sustainability of social-ecological systems. Resilient social-ecological systems are characterized by adaptive governance involving multi-tier processes of adaptive learning as most eloquently explained by Professor Elinor Ostrom, Nobel-laureate in Economics 2009.
Elsewhere, the term “National Resilience” officially entered the English language in the context of national security following national and global emergencies which destroyed human lives and livelihoods – including, but not limited to the terrorist attacks of September 11th in the US, and “foot-and-mouth-disease" (FMD) epidemic in the UK in 2001.
Globally, promoting the resilience of nations and communities to prevent or mitigate disaster was the focus of the first World Conference on Disaster Reduction held in Kobe, Hyogo, Japan, in January 2005 which adopted the “Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015”.
Against this multi-faceted backdrop, this program brings together interdisciplinary research, and cross-sector policy and practice analysis to bear on teaching, advising and mentorship of professional, graduate, as well as undergraduate members of the Tufts community in and outside the classroom. Wider participation is encouraged through our electronic International Resilience Forum and a new in-house journal Resilience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Science and Humanitarianism that appeared in March 2010, the 25th anniversary year of the Institute for Global Leadership's core program, Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship.