Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

hold resilience strategies and outcomes to the reason- able bar of promoting equity and justice? And perhaps most importantly, what can colleges and universities bring to the question of resilience? In this introduction to the Journal of Environ- mental Studies and Science's special symposium on water resilience, we hope to contribute to the ongoing conversation on resilient water resource management by not only interrogating the knowledge colleges and universities produce around the concept of resilience, but also academia's role as both knowledge producer and consumer. In other words, when we ask what col- leges and universities can bring to the question of re- silience, we are suggesting that, of course, they play a critical role in creating knowledge and training both theorists and practitioners. We must always reflect on and push our knowledge frontiers. But a deeper func- tion of this question is to ask what kinds of biases are inherent in college and university knowledge produc- tion and legitimation? In this examination of resil- ience, our overarching agenda is to continue moving forward critical conversations about the politics of new and ongoing resource frameworks. Along with this introduction, what follows are five articles written by Pace University faculty and col- laborators with a focus on different aspects of resilient water resource management. Our goal for this intro- duction is to link these papers to the broader literature while making the argument that colleges and universi- ties must not only contribute to resilience studies, we also must help reimagine these ideas and the systems they arguably make more resilient. In what follows, we explore the conceptual growth of resilience as an ob- ject of inquiry, including some of its possible meanings and applications. We then present some considerations for resilience studies, including critical questions that still remain. We conclude with a brief synopsis of the papers in this symposium and an ideal next agenda for resilience research in the field of environmental stud- ies and sciences. Resilience as boundary object Research and practice emanating from Holling's sem- inal manuscript has challenged the idea that dynamic equilibrium effectively described ecosystems over time (and, not coincidentally, that engineered resilience of an ecosystem could sustain yields year-aer-year in a healthy manner). Holling and his colleagues pushed these conventional notions through the idea of com- plexity, or a more "complex notion of resilience that can account for the ability of an ecosystem to remain cohesive even while undergoing extreme perturba- tions" (Walker and Cooper 2011, p. 145). is perspec- tive was adopted into natural resource management, informing what would eventually be called adaptive management (Walker et al. 2004; Adger 2000; Walters 1986). Quickly thereaer, resource managers recog- nized that systems could not be characterized with- out understanding their social dynamics, prompting calls for studies of, and strategies for, adaptive gover- nance of social-ecological systems (Lebel et al. 2006). rough this process, resilience—a once descriptive term for ecosystems—became a discursive boundary object that linked multiple disciplines through some shared normative and illustrative characteristics. Al- though this approach is oen lauded as multi- or in- terdisciplinary, critics suggest it also diluted the mean- ing of resilience and made it challenging to apply in practice (Brand and Jax 2007). Likewise, it exposed a range of power dynamics and injustices that both exist and are created/exacerbated through resilience frame- works (Awiti 2011; Carr 2019; Curran and Hamilton 2012; Harris et al. 2017; DuPuis and Greenberg 2019; Ziervogel et al. 2017). e bottom line is that resilience has come un- der fire as a potential floating signifier that suggests an effective systems management approach, but is also easily co-opted—intentionally or not—for already fa- miliar social strategies and political outcomes. United States environmental agencies, for example, are substi- tuting the word resilience for a very necessary but oc- cluded conversation about climate change (e.g., NSF's Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructures program, NOAA's Coastal Resilience programs). Resilience be- comes the abstracted justification for giant urban in- frastructure projects that do not take into account (or paper over) issues such as race, class, and gender (Fine- wood 2016). A lack of resilience in rural areas becomes a proxy for explaining lowering mortality rates and a hope for the return of extractive economy jobs (Catte 2018). Sustainability, the progeny of resilience, seems to have already lost its idealized purpose, reduced to a swath of technological solutions that are starting to repeat the patterns of 1960s US urban development, which had the devastating long-term impact of de- stroying communities in the name of a new, more sus- tainable type of growth (Dreier et al. 2004; Elmqvist et al. 2019; Gould and Lewis 2018; Henderson 2014). Colleges and universities are faced with navi- gating the resilience community as both creator and necessary critic of this evolving knowledge discourse 5

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