“Graceful Failure”: The Privatization of Resilience

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Notes

Resilience was touted by more than one commentator as the “word of the year” for 2012 (Bergman 2012; Juniper 2011).

The Optimistic Kids program in South Australia charges $516 per child for twelve group sessions (http://www.optimistickids.com.au/index.html/). Canadian psychologist Alex Russell, co-author of Drop the Worry Ball: Parenting in the Age of Entitlement (2012), offers workshops for parents and students for $5000—not an exorbitant fee but out of the range of many public schools. Of the seventy-eight talks listed on Russell's website as having been delivered to parents, students, and administrators, fifty-five were sponsored by independent schools or associations.

Wary of the neoconservativism of William Bennett's notion of virtues education, Randolph also rejected the “mushy,” “touchy-feely” tone of other programs (Tough 2012, 57), including Riverdale's own CARE (Children Aware of Riverdale Ethics) program, which was based on principles such as “'Treat everyone with respect'” and “‘Be aware of other people's feelings and find ways to help those whose feelings have been hurt'” (quoted in Tough 2012, 78). Although Randolph characterized the new program diplomatically as “CARE 2.0,” Tough commented, “in fact … the character-strength approach of Peterson and Seligman isn't an expansion of programs like CARE; if anything, it is a repudiation of them,” in its de-emphasis on “nice-guy values” (which Randolph dismissed as “really vague”) in favor of “more tangible” performance values (Tough 2012, 78).

See also Russell (2012) and Luthar and Sexton (2004).

Increasing turbulence is a founding assumption in most social scientific resilience literature (see, e.g., Schwartz 2004, 22, 261; Zolli and Healy 2012, x).

Levin, the principal of the low-income KIPP charter school, notes that one of the appeals of the character-strength approach (based, according to Seligman and Peterson, on “character strengths common to all cultures and eras”) is that it is “fundamentally devoid of value judgment” (quoted in Tough 2011).

Foucault used the term governmentality to describe a “mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one which produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social” (Brown 2003, sec. 2).

The term responsibilization, deriving from Foucaultian theories of governmentality, refers to the “process whereby subjects are rendered individually responsible for a task which previously would have been the duty of another—usually a state agency—or would not have been recognized as a responsibility at all. The process is strongly associated with neoliberal political discourses, where it takes on the implication that the subject being responsibilized has avoided this duty or the responsibility has been taken away from them in the welfare-state era” (O'Malley 2009).

Coined by the U.S. Army War College, the term VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) has gained currency within the military and beyond as a description of “a world order where the threats are both diffuse and uncertain [and] where conflict is inherent yet unpredictable” (Department of Command, Leadership and Management 2010, 1).

One of the appeals of the program is that “prevention approaches that emphasize strengths instead of weaknesses are inherently less stigmatizing than traditional treatment-oriented interventions” (Meredith et al. 2011, 5).

Although this article focuses on private (i.e., tuition-charging) schools, the educational landscape in the United States is complicated by the proliferation of charter and magnet schools, whose putative universal accessibility (e.g., through a voucher system) glosses over the fact of continued segregation by race and class (Frankenberg, Siegel-Hawley, and Wang 2011; Garcia 2008; Lipman 2011).

Independent schools enjoy a more-than-metaphorical correlation to gated communities, which Brad Evans and Julian Reid (2013, 97) characterized as extreme embodiments of the uneven distribution of risk in the “networked assemblage” of resilience cultures.

Indeed, as Evans and Reid (2013, 87) argued, for the resilient subject, “the dangerousness of life becomes its condition of possibility rather than its threat. In a certain sense, the resilient subject thrives on danger.”

The Stand-Your-Ground laws enacted in Florida and other U.S. states, which were made infamous by the shooting of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, lend weight to the military model of resilience by sanctioning habits of vigilance, intuition and pro-activity.

Resilience plays an increasing role in mental health services in postsecondary institutions (Stallman 2011). In an incisive analysis of the neoliberal cast of wellness discourses at the University of Toronto, Katie Albrecht suggested, “vocabularies of resilience operate as insurance for the university against critique that the social organization of everyday life and distribution of resources within the university contribute to suffering and to the appearance and experience of uncertainty (represented as depression and anxiety) in students’ lives … This language is circulated within a context of shrinking resources within the university, wherein more traditional (and labour intensive) pastoral care is difficult to carry out given, for example, growing class sizes, lower staff to student ratios, and the increasingly pervasive use of lower-paid temporary contract lecturers within universities” (72).

Feminist poststructuralist theory further complicates our understanding of resilience by recognizing that individuals do not exist a priori, but rather come into (gendered, sexed, racialized) being through the performance of social codes (Aranda, Zeeman, and Scholes 2012). The positive/positivist thrust of resilience is difficult to square with the irresolvable dialectic of bodies and identities.