ABSTRACT
Under- and unemployment, limited opportunities for advancement and for access to affordable housing, and challenges in accessing medical care may confront many young people if they are unable to innovate, demonstrate entrepreneurial resilience, or perform particular forms of personhood. Depicting young people’s struggles, anxieties, and resilience reflects the audiences’ reality, and the popularity of some of these shows is testimony to the appeal their narratives hold. The chapter aims to contribute a number of discussions in a variety of disciplines that seek both to critique, and to re-think the concept of resilience. Mainstream accounts of the marginalisation most often seek to identify and measure the individual psychological, emotional, and physical characteristics of young people’s resilience. Resilience implies a systematic, widespread, organizational, structural and personal strengthening of subjective and material arrangements so as to be better able to anticipate and tolerate disturbances in complex worlds without collapse, to withstand shocks, and to rebuild as necessary.
