My personal journey on the pathway of resilience

Abstract

I take you on a journey from my earliest years, using the lens of community resilience and “desirable outcomes”. I describe a parallel evolution of both resilience literature and myself. I sketch-out inequalities, crushing of personal pathways, and emergence of new horizons. In retrospect, a consistent thread emerges: a twofold quest for justice: firstly, in relation to making a difference with those experiencing poverty, mental ill health, inequality or any hidden dimension of marginality within rural communities—by putting them “on the map” through people’s own narratives and secondly, through my own personal pathway towards realising my own right to be and becoming a professor. The act of writing causes me to see that the resilience literature is a “natural fit” for me: I was curious about it in terms of personal resilience; I was also intrigued to unpack assumptions around community resilience, given the inherent complexity of human connections. My “take home message”? A call to all of us to seek out what is invisible, both what is off the radar due to geography or small numbers of dispersed people and that which is in plain sight but nonetheless hidden. Let us prioritise the lived-experience of others, continuing to generate evidence that challenges and makes a difference.