Introduction

This chapter highlights key areas for further conceptual development as critical scholars continue to grapple with the challenges resilience in the Anthropocene poses to critical thought. Research from a variety of disciplines over the past two decades has detailed multiple contradictory and incompatible definitions of resilience that circulate within diverse policy and academic fields. Focusing analytical attention on the contextualised and situated practices of thought thus allows us to inductively examine resilience in the Anthropocene without relying on the deductive identification of the formal qualities of resilience. Situating resilience in relation to the Anthropocene thus complicates the easy equation between resilience and neoliberalism that many first-cut critiques of resilience offered. Anthropocene thinking provides a critique of the resilience assumption that shocks are ‘inevitable’ and that adaptation is the only way forward, understanding relationality at the level of causes as well as of effects.