“Everything is Connected”: Seven Stops
SSU Convocation Address April 17, 2021
Lois P. Mitchell, PhD
Friends and especially graduates… It’s really a privilege to be invited to speak this morning. But of course, it’s also a challenge. What to say? Where to start, how to end? I’ve had fun trying to pull my thoughts together in some more or less coherent form– you’ll be happy to know that this is the abridged version. Even so, time is short so, here we go…
“Everything is connected. We can start anywhere and go anywhere. We will never know all the connections but we can know enough to get around.”
Those are the words of Dr. JEP Butler, now deceased, who I met 40 or so years ago (when I was about 23) and doing my PhD in Sociology at the University of New Brunswick and he was 86 – retired, of course, but still very engaged in reading and thinking. He became a mentor and friend. I’ve included this quote in nearly every syllabus I created at SSU. My talk this morning will be a sort of demonstration of the maxim – a tiny glimpse at how we can start anywhere and go anywhere – that’s the hope!
Imagine that we’re going on a road trip and we’re going to make some stops along the way - “scenic lookouts” or “points of interest”. There will be seven stops in all.
STOP ONE: RESILIENCE
I’ve always assumed that resilience is a good thing. Resilience is defined as “the ability to withstand adversity and bounce back from difficult life events.”1 We celebrate people or communities that demonstrate resilience. We think, for example, of individuals who just seem to get knocked down, again and again, by life’s circumstances, and we call them “resilient” when they get back up, dust themselves off, and have another go; we call communities resilient when they refuse to give up after a disaster of some kind – natural or manmade - or through chronic challenges and misfortune. There are endless examples, from small communities to large, whole nations even – both rich and poor. And we call “ethnic minority groups” resilient when they survive the pressures and priorities of dominant cultural groups.
Life goes on… if you’re resilient. Surely then, to be resilient is something to celebrate. But then I hear about a new podcast called “Don’t Call Me Resilient”2 – the promo says that “it’s a provocative podcast about race that goes in search of solutions for those things no one should have to be resilient for”, hosted and produced by Vinita Srivastava. Maybe there’s more to resilience than I’d thought.
What if – in the name of resilience - we are actually maintaining and even still developing policies that force resilience on whole communities or ethnicities of people? What if we are sometimes using resilience as a front for persistent INjustice?
As I say this out loud, it seems painfully obvious that this is, in fact, the case. We say we want to address poverty, or homelessness, or addictions, or mental health issues, and so on. We pour money into initiatives that we think will help and maybe we move the needle ever so slightly. But then the money runs out, the program ends and too often, nothing much has changed. Time passes and those who are IN the circumstances know that resilience is just another word for survival in the face of hardship. At some point, resilience shouldn’t be celebrated; it should be resisted. To be called “resilient” isn’t a compliment (in some cases) so much as a vote for the status quo.
Moving on… we’ll make a brief stop at our second “lookout”.
CLICK HERE to download the full PDF of Lois Mitchell, "Everything is Connected"
Lois Mitchell is the Director of International Studies at St. Stephen's University (NB).
Comments