Resilience and the politics of multiplicity

Abstract

In this response to the commentaries, we expand on the intent behind the format of our article, which was undertaken in order to understand how resilience might be politically taken to task in light of the divergent ways in which it appears in the world. We take on (and sympathize with) the critique that our article sacrifices the ethnographic depth central to Mol’s work on ontological politics, which forms the conceptual backbone of our arguments. Although this approach could not dig deep into each instance, we argue that it did allow common currents of resilience politics to come to the fore, namely, questions concerning ontologies of site and intervention that should be asked of all resilience enactments. From here, we engage with the different commentaries related to politics and critical thought and insist on our core concern that ontologies of site and intervention are crucial for interrogating security, care, and responsibility, which are fundamentally at stake in all resilience governance. Finally, we reflect on ways in which our article was perhaps not multiple enough and draw encouragement from the commentaries that applied our questions of site and intervention to the authors’ own situated perspectives or areas of study, in particular through indigenous ontologies. These are taken as illustrations of the value of attending to the ontological politics of resilience multiple by forcing questions of power/knowledge, responsibility and value that scratch beneath the surface of current resilience fashions.