RESEARCH

Resilience is never only about resilience. To call someone resilient is to make consequential claims about adversity, adaptation, what counts as recovery, what should remain intact, what is considered "normal",  and about what a person ought to be capable of carrying.

Resilience is often presented as an uncomplicated human good, virtue. The Healing Project is interested in troubling that narrative and seriously considering what is underneath that goodness. What happens when endurance becomes admirable while the conditions requiring endurance have been made acceptable?  What happens when institutions celebrate the adaptability of people they have failed to protect? What happens when surviving becomes so recognizable as strength and resilience, and so much so, that we stop asking what survival has cost?

Our scholarship began by tracing the genealogy of resilience among Blackwomen. That genealogy matters because Blackwomen have repeatedly been narrated through strength.

Strong enough to carry.

Strong enough to continue.

Strong enough to care for others.

Strong enough to survive.

The praise of Blackwomen's imposed strength is not innocent. Strength can, and has, become expectation and that expectation can become discipline and performance. And eventually the capacity to survive can obscure the violence of having been made to survive so much, and in the first place.

The Healing Project therefore treats resilience as more than a psychological or psychosocial capacity. We study resilience as a historical, epistemic, political, and methodological object. 

The question is not whether resilience exists. The question is what we have asked resilience to explain.

What if story is not waiting for us to interpret it? Qualitative inquiry often says that stories matter, then it extracts, codes, and breaks them into themes and reassembles them as findings. The story becomes valuable because the researcher can explain what it means.

The Healing Project is interested in another possibility. What if story is already doing theoretical work?  We work with testimonios, story circles, poetic inquiry, narrative, dialogue, creative expression, and arts-informed approaches because we are interested in more than collecting richer data. We are interested in what happens when people are recognized as makers of both meaning and knowledge.

This is particularly consequential for groups historically relegated to the margins. Such have been extraordinarily available to research as evidence. The Healing Project asks what changes when historically marginalized and oppressed groups do not merely provide the evidence, but they theorize the problem, their stories destabilize the researcher's categories, and their lived experience refuses to remain illustrative. That is our epistemic shift.

Knowledge does not appear independently of the world built around its telling. Every research encounter constructs conditions. RARE Spaces emerged because those conditions became impossible for us to overlook or write off. RARE asks what happens when the ecology of inquiry becomes part of the inquiry itself. What forms of knowledge require time, trust, risk, silence, embodiment, art, relationship, collective witnessing, permission to contradict oneself, permission to not know, and permission to refuse terms of the question.

RARE Spaces begins from the proposition that changing the environment of inquiry may change more than participation. It may also change what becomes knowable. That proposition now opens several emerging questions:

• Can a research spaces redistribute epistemic authority?
• Can environmental and relational conditions alter not simply what people disclose, but what people are able to think together?
• Can the research encounter become a third space in which neither conventional researcher nor conventional participant remains fully intact?
• What forms of knowledge become possible when the arrangement itself is interrupted?

These questions place RARE Spaces increasingly in conversation with Black feminist geography, counterspace scholarship, third-space traditions, homeplace, relational theories of inquiry, and questions about environment. 

There is another question appearing beneath the resilience work: why does adaptation remain so easily located inside the person? A resilient individual, a coping individual, a thriving individual, a dysregulated individual, a person possessing more or less capacity.

But living beings do not develop outside conditions. Beronda L. Montgomery's work on plants and organism-environment relationships offers a productive provocation here. Not because plants are inspirational models for human endurance; they are not. And not because human beings should "bloom where they are planted." That formulation reproduces the very politics of adaptation we are trying to interrogate.

The deeper question is environmental since living systems perceive, respond, relate, adjust, and become. And what becomes possible is inseparable from the environments in which life unfolds. What might resilience scholarship look like if environment were not treated merely as adversity, exposure, or context surrounding an otherwise self-contained individual? What if environment were understood as constitutive and what if the question shifted from: what does this person possess that enables her to survive here? to: what is this environment making possible, demanding, withholding, or foreclosing? And then: what might become possible under different conditions?

Critique is necessary but critique cannot be  the last world we build. There is a danger in becoming so accomplished at naming domination that domination remains the intellectual center of everything. 

Black life becomes interesting because racism harms it. Likewise, Blackwomen become theoretically important because oppression acts upon them. Healing becomes recovery from injury. Or thriving becomes the absence of distress, liberation becomes a future we continuously gesture toward while the machinery of survival remains the thing we know best how to describe. The Healing Project refuses to stop there.

What does Black life know about pleasure?

Wonder?

Beauty?

Relation?

Curiosity?

Creation?

Rest?

Mystery?

The sacred?

The cosmos?

The more-than-instrumental?

What happens when human life is studied not simply in relation to what threatens it, but in relation to what enlarges it? These questions take our work into intellectual territory we are still learning how to name. Sylvia Wynter troubles the category of the Human itself.

Katherine McKittrick troubles the disciplinary arrangements through which Black life becomes knowable and asks us to attend to Black livingness, story, relation, and wonder. Christina Sharpe makes form itself part of how we attend to Black life, memory, beauty, grief, and possibility. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein refuses the proposition that the cosmos belongs intellectually to some people more than others.

Beronda L. Montgomery asks us to notice living systems, environments, responsiveness, and the conditions of thriving.

We do not bring these thinkers together because they say the same thing. We study with them because each interrupts a boundary or binary we have inherited: 

• Human / Man.
• Science / story.
• Nature / social life.
• Researcher / participant.
• Body / knowledge.
• Rigorous / creative.
• Survival / flourishing.
• World / otherwise.

Th question underneath it all:

What forms of human life become possible when surviving the world we inherited is no longer the most ambitious thing we can imagine?

The Healing Project does not begin from the assumption that every question should end with a stable answer. Research, here, is not simply the accumulation of knowledge. Sometimes it is the disciplined willingness to become uncertain about what we thought we already knew.