Susie O’Brien – författare

The idea of resilience is everywhere these days, offering a framework for thriving in volatile times. Dominant resilience stories share an attachment to a mythologized past thought to hold clues for navigating a future that is understood to be full of danger. These stories also uphold values of settler colonialism and white supremacy.

What the World Might Look Like examines the way resilience thinking has come to dominate the settler-colonial imagination and explores alternative approaches to resilience writing that instead offer decolonial models of thought. The book traces settler-colonial resilience stories to the rise of resilience science in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrating how the discipline supports the projects of white supremacy and colonialism. Working to unravel the blanket of common sense that shrouds the idea of resilience, the book is equally cautious of settler-colonial antiresilience stories that invoke the idea of death as an antidote to unbearable life. Susie O’Brien argues that, although the dominant narratives of resilience are problematic, resilience itself is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Appreciating the significance of resilience stories requires asking what worlds and what communities they are meant to preserve. Looking at the fiction of Alexis Wright, David Chariandy, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, O’Brien points to the potential of Black and Indigenous thinking around resilience to figure decolonial possibilities for planetary flourishing.

Exposing the complexities and limits of resilience, What the World Might Look Like questions the concept of resilience, highlighting how Black and Indigenous novelists can offer different decolonial ways of thinking about and with resilience to imagine things “otherwise.”

The idea of resilience is everywhere these days, offering a framework for thriving in volatile times. Dominant resilience stories share an attachment to a mythologized past thought to hold clues for navigating a future that is understood to be full of danger. These stories also uphold values of settler colonialism and white supremacy.

What the World Might Look Like examines the way resilience thinking has come to dominate the settler-colonial imagination and explores alternative approaches to resilience writing that instead offer decolonial models of thought. The book traces settler-colonial resilience stories to the rise of resilience science in the 1970s and 1980s, illustrating how the discipline supports the projects of white supremacy and colonialism. Working to unravel the blanket of common sense that shrouds the idea of resilience, the book is equally cautious of settler-colonial antiresilience stories that invoke the idea of death as an antidote to unbearable life. Susie O’Brien argues that, although the dominant narratives of resilience are problematic, resilience itself is neither inherently good nor inherently bad. Appreciating the significance of resilience stories requires asking what worlds and what communities they are meant to preserve. Looking at the fiction of Alexis Wright, David Chariandy, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, O’Brien points to the potential of Black and Indigenous thinking around resilience to figure decolonial possibilities for planetary flourishing.

Exposing the complexities and limits of resilience, What the World Might Look Like questions the concept of resilience, highlighting how Black and Indigenous novelists can offer different decolonial ways of thinking about and with resilience to imagine things “otherwise.”

Popular Culture: A User’s Guide, International Edition ventures beyond the history of pop culture to give readers the vocabulary and tools to address and analyze the contemporary cultural landscape that surrounds them.

This edited volume focuses on the intersection of time and globalization, as manifested across a variety of economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts. Since David Harvey’s influential characterization of globalization as "time-space compression", ample research has looked at the spatial aspect of the phenomenon, yet few have focused on globalization’s temporal aspects. Meanwhile, other publications have analysed problems of speed, acceleration, and the commodification of time, but while it often serves as the implicit or explicit backdrop for these studies of time, globalization is not investigated as a problem or a question in its own right. In response, this volume develops these conversations to consider how time shapes globalization, and how globalization affects our experience of time.

The interplay between varying aspects of the human experiences of time and globalization requires the type of interdisciplinary approach that this volume takes. The contributors advance an understanding of global time(s) as an arena of contestation, with social, political, ecological, and cultural implications for human and other lives. In considering the diverse valences of time and globalization, they illuminate problems as well as possibilities. Topics covered include emerging infectious diseases, temporal sovereignty, worker exploitation and resistance, chronobiology, energy politics, activism and hope, and literary and cinematic representations of counter-temporalities, offering a rich and varied account of global times.

This volume will be of great interest to students and researchers from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, globalization, international relations, literary studies, political science, social theory, and sociology.

This edited volume focuses on the intersection of time and globalization, as manifested across a variety of economic, political, cultural, and environmental contexts. Since David Harvey’s influential characterization of globalization as "time-space compression", ample research has looked at the spatial aspect of the phenomenon, yet few have focused on globalization’s temporal aspects. Meanwhile, other publications have analysed problems of speed, acceleration, and the commodification of time, but while it often serves as the implicit or explicit backdrop for these studies of time, globalization is not investigated as a problem or a question in its own right. In response, this volume develops these conversations to consider how time shapes globalization, and how globalization affects our experience of time.

The interplay between varying aspects of the human experiences of time and globalization requires the type of interdisciplinary approach that this volume takes. The contributors advance an understanding of global time(s) as an arena of contestation, with social, political, ecological, and cultural implications for human and other lives. In considering the diverse valences of time and globalization, they illuminate problems as well as possibilities. Topics covered include emerging infectious diseases, temporal sovereignty, worker exploitation and resistance, chronobiology, energy politics, activism and hope, and literary and cinematic representations of counter-temporalities, offering a rich and varied account of global times.

This volume will be of great interest to students and researchers from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, globalization, international relations, literary studies, political science, social theory, and sociology.

Both academic and popular representations of globalization, critical or celebratory, have tended to conceptualize it primarily in spatial terms, rather than simultaneously temporal ones. However, time, in both its ideational and material dimensions, has played an important role in mediating and shaping the directions, courses, and outcomes of globalization.

Focusing on the intersection of time and globalization, this book aims to create an interdisciplinary dialogue between the (largely separated) respective literatures on each of these themes. This dialogue will be of both theoretical and empirical significance, since many urgent issues of contemporary human affairs—from large epochal problems such as climate change, to everyday struggles with the dynamics of social acceleration—involve a complex interplay between temporality and globalization. A critical understanding of the relationship between time and globalization will not only facilitate innovative thinking about globalization; it will also foster our imagination of alternatives that may lead to more socially just and sustainable futures. This innovative collection illustrates the theoretical benefits of bridging time with globalization and also exemplifies the methodological strengths of engaging in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary scholarship to better understand the changing economic, social, political, cultural and ecological dynamics in this globalizing world.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Globalizations.