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Mattawa, Ontario is located at the confluence of the Mattawa and Ottawa Rivers, east of North Bay on the Ontario-Quebec border. On the Quebec side of the river, high on top of the hill, stand three crosses. These crosses were first erected by Samuel De Champlain's party in 1614 to mark the place where the rivers met. From downstream on the Ottawa, the crosses could be seen from a great distance. Champlain's party were the first white people to see this place. Over the centuries, the crosses weathered and were replaced when necessary.

This paper analyses contrasting academic understandings of 'equilibrium resilience' and 'evolutionary resilience' and investigates how these nuances are reflected within both policy and practice. We reveal that there is a lack of clarity in policy, where these differences are not acknowledged with resilience mainly discussed as a singular, vague, but optimistic aim. This opaque political treatment of the term and the lack of guidance has affected practice by privileging an equilibrist interpretation over more transformative, evolutionary measures. In short, resilience within spatial planning is characterised by a simple return to normality that is more analogous with planning norms, engineered responses, dominant interests, and technomanagerial trends. The paper argues that, although presented as a possible paradigm shift, resilience policy and practice underpin existing behaviour and normalise risk. It leaves unaddressed wider sociocultural concerns and instead emerges as a narrow, regressive, technorational frame centred on reactive measures at the building scale.

This commentary provides an overview of the idea of resilience, and acknowledges the challenges of defining and applying the idea in practice. The article summarizes a way of looking at resilience called a "resilience delta", that takes into account both the shock done to a community by a disaster and the capacity of that community to rebound from that shock to return to its prior functionality. I show how different features of the community can create resilience, and consider how the developed and developing world addresses resilience. I also consider the role of focusing events in gaining attention to events and promoting change. I note that, while focusing events are considered by many in the disaster studies field to be major drivers of policy change in the United States disaster policy, most disasters have little effect on the overall doctrine of shared responsibilities between the national and subnational governments.

Objective:As human factors and ergonomics (HF/E) moves to embrace a greater systems perspective concerning human–machine technologies, new and emergent properties, such as resilience, have arisen. Our objective here is to promote discussion as to how to measure this latter, complex phenomenon.Background:Resilience is now a much-referenced goal for technology and work system design. It subsumes the new movement of resilience engineering. As part of a broader systems approach to HF/E, this concept requires both a definitive specification and an associated measurement methodology. Such an effort epitomizes our present work.Method:Using rational analytic and synthetic methods, we offer an approach to the measurement of resilience capacity.Results:We explicate how our proposed approach can be employed to compare resilience across multiple systems and domains, and emphasize avenues for its future development and validation.Conclusion:Emerging concerns for the promise and potential of resilience and associated concepts, such as adaptability, are highlighted. Arguments skeptical of these emerging dimensions must be met with quantitative answers; we advance one approach here.Application:Robust and validated measures of resilience will enable coherent and rational discussions of complex emergent properties in macrocognitive system science.

Studies of queer and trans suffering, resilience, care, and vitalities are invariably also investigations into the difficult and painful articulations of lives that feel worth living and deaths that feel okay dying. The notion of resiliency, referring to a conditional state of overcoming difficult situations, neglects to fully encompass our understandings of risk, vulnerability, and life. This article explores the ways in which Washington, DC–based trans activists discuss shared coalitional labor as constituting that which renders viable life—or, in some cases, what they describe as deaths worth dying—in a contemporary moment that is distinctly violent. While health researchers have long noted the beneficial role that a coalition serves in better representing needs in research, this article focuses on how individuals meet their needs not through solitary and normative resilience strategies but within and through spaces of coalitional action. This approach to radical care and viable life encourages us to rethink how a necropolitics of trans life—lives marked as morally suspect and intrinsically disposable—coexists with a notion of trans vitalities that this article develops. Ultimately, embracing the concept of trans vitalities is not simply a refusal or disavowal of projects of normalization or the commodifiability of trans rights but, rather, a vigilance toward the violently homogenizing expectations of the heterogeneity of lived experience.

This article describes the development and field testing of the Rural Resilience Index (RRI), an applied disaster resilience assessment index for use in rural and remote communities. The index was generated as part of the Rural Disaster Resilience Project. This community-centered action research project was designed to respond to the global emphasis on increasing the capacity of all communities, large and small, to meet the growing challenge of disasters, climate change, and other threats. The goals of the project were to produce resilience assessment and planning tools that could be used by communities to generate locally relevant data on their current resilience and be able to monitor and enhance their resilience over time. This article describes the development and field testing of the RRI, which is designed as a user-friendly, process-based, qualitative resilience assessment tool. The RRI emphasizes the value of citizen engagement in resilience planning and a whole-of-community approach to resilience addressing issues such as the quality and availability of local resources, expertise, skills, and services; governance issues; economic and employment issues; culture; disaster preparedness; and emergency management planning.