Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and coeditor of
Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington and coeditor of
Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and coeditor of
Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington and coeditor of
Making Us Resilient: Responsible Citizens for Uncertain Times
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Published:March 2017
Nikolas Rose, Filippa Lentzos, 2017. "Making Us Resilient: Responsible Citizens for Uncertain Times", Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle
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To inculcate the obligation of responsibility—has this not been the aspiration of almost all of those who hope to govern human beings, who seek to implant technologies of self-mastery in each individual who is to live life in freedom? This chapter briefly reviews some of the configurations for the “conduct of conduct,” in which responsibility has been central, and argues that it is misleading to associate an ethopolitics of responsibility with neoliberalism, as has been attempted by a number of recent writers. The ubiquity of the term resilience in contemporary political discourse suggests that this ethic of responsibility is being reworked in the context of a pervasive concern with managing individual and collective conduct in the face of insecurity and uncertainty. While some see the rise of resilience strategies as the apotheosis of reactionary individualism, we conclude by exploring whether, and in what ways, these new strategies might provide opportunities for a more progressive politics.
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