Resilience and Digital Inclusion: The Digital Re-making of Vulnerability?

Abstract

The emergence of a neoliberal and individualizing digital resilience discourse in scholarly, governmental, humanitarian, and policy initiatives risks vulnerabilizing groups such as ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and elderly people. As a corrective, in this chapter I reclaim resilience as a critical concept and social justice-oriented aspiration. Emancipatory epistemologies and methodologies are needed to better account for the increasingly digitized, ambivalent, and power-ridden processes with regard to digital inclusion of underserved and marginalized communities through resilience. In particular, I argue for a relational, situated, and intersectional approach to acknowledge better how communities engage in specific everyday media practices. For this purpose, relevant communities need to be heard and involved in academic knowledge production as active agents and experts over their own experiences. Through amplifying voices, signaling broader contexts of entrenched power hierarchies, and creating new critical vocabularies, scholars can contribute to new coalitions needed for systematic transformation.