There’s a lot to keep track of. I’m reading, writing, taking notes, reading notes, doing workshops, planning workshops, being a dad, being a citizen of a failing democracy, trying to also enjoy myself. It’s an academic year-long sabbatical, and I’m calling my project Paradigms of Resilience. I need to buy that domain name…

Today I read two articles, neither of them empirical, somehow related to resilience. Pretty simple, and not much to show for the effort.

The first, “Making Meaning and Finding Purpose: What Research into Post Traumatic Growth Can Teach Us as Educators in a Post-Pandemic World,” by Kathryn Mettler, was about post-traumatic growth and the pandemic. The author did a good job showing the ways that, technically, the pandemic was traumatic. That is, it fit with two commonly ascribed aspects of trauma: it compromised safety, and it compromised autonomy. The author was quick to point out that calling it a collective trauma was risky: some people went through the “rough waters” of the pandemic on a yacht, others on a pool noodle. What followed were a series of strengths-based questions that asked how growth had occurred in three domains: changes in self, changes in relationships, and changes in life philosophy. I liked what she had to say, and as far as paradigms of resilience go, she had a few specific examples (that’s the sense in which I’m using paradigm, an example). The best was this: being forced to teach online, which she didn’t like, helped her gain a sense of the importance to her of forming relationships with the students in her classes. With this knowledge, she is now even more intentional than ever about connecting with students on personal and academic wavelengths.

The second piece I read was about a research methodology known as community-based participatory research (CBPR) during the pandemic. This one is “Community-Based Participatory Research During the COVID-19 Crisis: Lessons for Partnership Resiliency,” by Elaine K. Donnelly, Robin Toof, and Linda Silka. I highlighted a lot more of this one, for some reason. There were a lot of examples from these three researchers showing the ways CBPR can be flexible and support resilience. This one was very broad, as methodological pieces often are. What they saw was that during the pandemic, places that had strong, long-term research community-community-government-organization partnerships rolled with the pandemic, found stable ground more quickly, and managed to achieve goals. Examples included ecological impact on clam fisheries, opioid crisis, and downtown revitalization.

One of the ideas in this article is seemingly quite logical: if you have various stakeholders working together in an equitable way, resources can be shared where needed, information can be delivered across what would usually be barriers, and therefor problems can be solved quickly. This is how CBPR supports resilience. This is all well and good. But the stakeholders actually have to be interested in solving problems in the first place. There has to be flexibility to allow for a group of researchers to experiment with a potential solution that is counter intuitive. Power must be shared for this to work.

In our current political environment, I would not assume that various groups would allow for such a model to exist. That is to say, politics can get in the way of solving actual problems. If the people in charge think they’re the smartest people ever to live on the planet, and anyone else’s solutions to problems are either stupid or woke or whatever other political witchery they come up with, there is no incentive to work in the fashion supported by CBPR. Not only will politics impede the solving of problems, certain politicians will make existing problems far worse. See, for just one of many examples, current attempts to eliminate the Roadless Rule.