The term resilience is overused and under theorized. This dissertation challenges prevailing resilience discourses, exploring the tensions of embodied and experiential relationships with resilience that complicate the overly reductive and overly positive notion of resilience as a virtue of neoliberal subjects. Understanding resilience in the context of contemporary Western society necessitates unraveling the societal conditions shaped by the dominant neoliberal capitalist ethos of production. To address these problems, I explore how resilience is lived in the impasse of the crisis ordinary. Guided by affect theory, critical phenomenology, and queer theory, my study centers on ambiguity, subjectivity, and normativity in order to contend with the complexities and contradictions of resilience. Through a novel impassive bricolage methodology, I explore the lived and embodied experiences of resilience through relational, reflexive, and creative processes of autohistoria-teoría, flashpoint methodology, heuristic inquiry, and a participatory, reflexive thematic analysis. This study engaged with three women co-researchers who have recently completed graduate programs in design-related fields. Data collection included written reflections, interviews, focus group recordings, and creative works. Analysis revealed three central themes: disorientation, movement, and disconnection. For these co-researchers, resilience emerged as a complex and ambiguous phenomenon, responding to the push and pull between self and the normative world. Reconceptualizing resilience as emerging from and including queer affects, I redirect focus from linear progression, attending instead to ambiguous and awkward movements of the impasse. By unraveling resilience, my project opens up ways to live the impasse by loosening attachments to good-life fantasies and embracing happiness without guarantees.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unt.edu/info:ark/67531/metadc2332647 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Donaldson, Christina |
| Contributors | Lewis, Tyson, Sharma, Manisha, Keating, AnaLouise |
| Publisher | University of North Texas |
| Source Sets | University of North Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | Text |
| Rights | Public, Donaldson, Christina, Copyright, Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise noted. All rights Reserved. |
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