Dyson College of Arts and Sciences

and its outcomes. Research suggests that resilience as a descriptor of social-ecological systems and as a man- agement framework is provoking responses that are highly securitized and limited in their political ori- entation (Walker and Cooper 2011). It does not seem like a stretch to imagine a future social-ecological state whereby nations have not developed a coordinated re- sponse to, for example, the underlying causes of cli- mate change and instead respond by focusing on hard- ening their borders and infrastructure in the name of resilience. At worst, this could produce a kind of re- actionary lifeboat fascism focused on making a racial- ized homeland resilient to external shocks (Reid 2013). us, the stakes are high, and it is not enough for col- leges and universities to produce knowledge; they must also focus on how the knowledge is produced and toward what social and ecological ends (Cote and Nightingale 2012; Henderson and Zarger 2017; Hursh et al. 2015). Perhaps, then, we should consider how resil- ience functions as an object of inquiry and concern. Following Brown (2015), what social and material work does resilience do when deployed by various ac- tors across diverse contexts, and in relation to water dynamics in particular? In other words, how are so- cial actors using resilience and with what social and ecological effects? What social logics (Bourdieu 1990) are they loading under the umbrella of resilience, and what ideas are excluded from such projects? What kind of work does not happen within the definitational parameters of resilience? Institutions of higher educa- tion are ideal places for examining such questions giv- en their role in creating and legitimating knowledge in both scholarship and in the training of practitioners. Resilience as boundary object Educationalists have taken up resilience theory in two key ways that are quite contextually and analytically different and yet conceptually similar. Mental health professionals and psychologists use resilience as a way to think about how individual students respond to traumas and other inequities in their lives. In this literature (see Zolkoski and Bullock (2012) for a thor- ough review), students' life experiences are positioned relative to physically, emotionally, psychologically, and materially challenging social conditions that oen manifest as individual trauma. e primary goal of this psychologically oriented literature is to examine what therapeutic and educational conditions might assist students in developing resilience competencies so they can continue regardless of challenging circumstances. More ecologically focused education scholars have taken up resilience theory to examine how both learners and broader educational institutions and sys- tems are implicated in ecological conditions. is liter- ature is in environmental education and is best exem- plified by a special issue of the journal Environmental Education Research (see Krasny et al. (2010) for an overview). Scholars who engage resilience theory in environmental education have focused conceptual and analytic attention on learning (Sterling 2010), agricul- ture and (re)settlement knowledges (Shava et al. 2010), forests (Ballard and Belsky 2010), climate change education organizations (Boyd and Oshbar 2010), and biosphere reserves as educational contexts (Schultz and Lundholm 2010). is work situates educational processes, systems, institutions, and learners as need- ing to respond to feedback from systems relative to their behaviors over time (Krasny et al. 2010). Re- silience then, in this context, is still "concerned with the amount of disturbance or perturbation that a [social-ecological] system can absorb while remain- ing within a state; it also encompasses the degree of self-organization and the extent to which the system can learn and adapt" (Plummer 2010, p. 493). at is, social-ecological systems are dynamic and humans within those systems need to educationally account for how they both respond to, and impact, such changing conditions over time. In another example, we have noticed a shi toward resilience as a framing concept in our work on climate change, where much of this emerging pro- gramming and scholarship focuses on adaptation (e.g., www.epa.gov/arc-x) via the hardening and securitiza- tion of infrastructure. In their genealogical analysis of resilience theory, Walker and Cooper (2011:143) sug- gest that this kind of techn-scientific and securitized "crisis adaptation" reflects the politicaleconomic logic of neoliberalism whereby actors within complex sys- tems react to existing conditions without challenging the underlying sociopolitical logics of the system in the first place. To use an example from the aforementioned psychological domain, imagine teaching a young per- son of color that they need to learn resilience so they can persist in the face of the myriad challenges they will face in modern US society. While important, a fo- cus merely on resilience neglects the larger racial social structure that produces the shock in the first place. e knowledge colleges and universities are producing about resilience here, in these cases, is re- active, whereby actors and ecosystems respond to the 6

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