ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how ecologists' strategic practices of critique moved resilience from the margins of ecology to its current status as an important organizing principle for social and environmental governance. Stephen Collier's engagements with Foucault provide a roadmap for unpacking ecologists' critiques. He emphasizes the importance of the field of adversity that critique positions itself against. This is more than the object of critique, such as centralized planning or command-and-control environmental management strategies. A design sensibility has been an essential part of resilience scholars' critical interventions since their formative writings in the 1970s. As Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper's genealogy notes, C. S. Holling's ecological understanding of resilience emerged out of what ecologists came to diagnose as the "pathology" of command and control. The chapter also examines how resilience proponents constructed and played off their field of adversity to recalibrate research and management around topological understandings of social and ecological change.
