Resilience, Critique and the Limits of Geographic Thought in the Anthropocene

Abstract

As resilience has become an increasingly influential governance principle, geographers have been among the most ardent critics of the concept and its depoliticizing effects. But what might the last decade of geographic critiques of resilience tell us about the geographic thought today? Situating geographic research on resilience in the discipline’s reparative conjuncture and the problematic of the Anthropocene, this paper draws attention to what I call salvage geographies. Playing on James Clifford's (1986), sense of salvage ethnographies, salvage geographies refer to practices of geographic knowledge production that are organized around desires to secure the promise of modernist futurity in the Anthropocene. Analyzing the affective landscapes shaping critical geographic resilience research, I identity two forms of salvage geographies: first, solutions-oriented approaches prevalent in critical sustainability studies strive to salvage modernity’s promise for science to secure a future of limitless, progressive growth and development; second, radical approaches prevalent in political ecology and security studies often strive to salvage the promise of modernist critique to politicize knowledge. These salvage geographies can only be sustained through the instrumentalization of difference, which defutures or consumes the potential for other forms of geographic thought. Turning to feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist research, I highlight the potential for reparative disciplinary futures that orient geography towards problem-finding rather than problem-solving activities.