Cultures of Resilience

The capacity of a person, a group or a territory to come through crises depends on that of all the others: this is what the psychiatrist Serge Tisseron calls co-resilience. I agree with him, and I propose to look into the how. Co-resilience cannot be decreed, it is cultivated, through concrete methods that anyone can make their own.

This section brings together my methodological and practical proposals: collective creation settings, workshops on the imaginary of disasters, principles for leading collective intelligence, ways of sharing scarce resources such as coolness or the livable hours of the day. The cultural field holds a central place here, for cinemas, libraries, community centres and popular education venues already form the mesh where people gather and where imaginaries take shape: the available infrastructure of a culture of resilience.

The means described here are deliberately modest, paper, scissors, a room, a few hours, because methods that required rare means would reproduce the very inequalities that need reducing. I document these ways of doing so that anyone who leads groups can take them up, adapt them to their own territory and pass them on in turn.