Sociologising resilience through Bourdieu’s field analysis: misconceptualisation, conceptualisation, and reconceptualisation

Abstract

This paper intends to develop a sociological thinking of child and youth resilience through recourse to Bourdieu. The paper starts by problematising the misconceptualisation that equates resilience with adaptation. It then marks a clear conceptual boundary between the two notions. This is followed by a review of conceptualisations of resilience across different historical times and theoretical schools, discussing the paradigmatic shifts from the individualistic to the ecological framework. To enable an intellectual and innovative engagement with contemporary developments in resilience research, the paper comes to grips with a sociological reconceptualisation of resilience through Bourdieu’s field analysis. The crux here is to grapple with resilience to symbolic violence for emancipation from structural constraints – a thinking largely absent in current resilience work; and to complement the bulk of Bourdieusian research on reproduction by exploring a change-oriented resilience thinking through the work of the famed sociologist.

Keywords:

• Child and youth resilience
• Bourdieu
• field analysis
• sociological thinking of resilience
• social change
• symbolic violence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work reported in this paper is sponsored by the Australian Research Council (DE180100107).