Postdoc Lecture Series: Positive Differences and Social Resilience

Location

Mother Rosalie Hill Hall, Room 135

Free

In his essay ‘Group Autonomy and Narrative Identity: Blacks and Jews’, Laurence Thomas analyses the disparity between blacks and Jews in terms of the cultural (as opposed to socio-economic) ramifications of American racism: in particular, slavery and racism have deprived black people of an ennobling narrative—that is, a narrative imbued with meanings, values, and rituals conducive to human flourishing that is not driven solely by the putatively unifying goal of combating structural inequality and injustice.  In this essay I build on Thomas’s analysis to shed new light on how activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sought to develop an ennobling narrative that grows out of their own lived experiences and endeavours and how this process was disrupted by the abstract discourses that northern young liberals brought to Mississippi in the summer of 1964.  Through this analysis I advance a distinctive conception of social resilience—in particular, as the process in which an oppressed individual or group develops powers and possibilities that can drive personal growth and social cooperation on terms that are distinctive and specific to their own experiences and ongoing interactions. RSVP for the Positive Differences and Social Resilience Postdoc Lecture.