Research
RECOMENT explores how the concept of resilience can be used meaningfully in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts – beyond buzzwords and simplistic attributions.
We are aware that the widespread use of the term offers many opportunities but also risks. However, we see great potential, particularly in the humanities, cultural studies, and social sciences: resilience can help to better understand complex social, ecological, and cultural developments – not as a characteristic of individuals, but as a dynamic interplay of stability and change.
RECOMENT therefore pursues an innovative approach: We think of resilience as an observational perspective (heuristics) for reanalysing processes on multiple levels (e.g., biocultural, socio-ecological, historical) – without assuming linear or goal-oriented concepts of development. We focus on tensions, contradictions, and interactions between continuity and discontinuity.
The central questions addressed by RECOMENT are:
- Which concepts of resilience are analytically useful in which contexts?
- How can different scientific perspectives be meaningfully combined?
We distinguish between three central fields of research:
- Interventional vs. descriptive (empirical) approaches
- Individual vs. societal concepts of resilience
- Different theoretical and methodological interests
Our research experience to date – including from the DFG Collaborative Research Center FOR 2539 “Resilience” and the Leibniz Cooperative Excellence Project ReFadiP – shows that resilience opens new, previously underutilized perspectives on complex interrelationships and is an important interdisciplinary research topic.
RECOMENT brings together different understandings of resilience – as an analytical tool, as a scientific concept, as an everyday experience, and as a political category. Our goal: research that transcends disciplinary boundaries – with relevance far beyond the topic of resilience.
The overarching theme of RECOMENT is the question of how methodologies, methods, narratives, and theories of resilience differ across scientific disciplines and how they contribute to the interconnected semantic, scientific, public, and political field of “resilience”. Despite numerous discontinuities, RECOMENT does not perceive this field as inherently incompatible or contradictory but rather seeks productive moments and connections and their inter- and transdisciplinary potentials. The RECOMENT work program thus envisages four cross-cutting thematic areas (TA) to be addressed in four work packages (WP) by all participating PIs: