Societal resilience is an emerging paradigm. It refers to responses and strategies at the level of individuals, groups, organizations, and societies that are dealing with complex societal problems. At the same time, these responses contribute to innovative solutions that make society more resilient to current and future challenges. Societal resilience is, however, conceptually relatively undefined. This ambiguity is generally seen as problematic for scholarly work. In this chapter, the authors show that societal resilience is an important social concept because of its openness. To study resilience requires research methodologies that engage many actual stakeholders. Collaborating with societal stakeholders allows not only for co-generating knowledge of local relevance, but also stimulating a comprehensive and critical research approach. Therefore, the current openness of societal resilience does not constitute an undesirable theory gap. It enables the possibility of having plural perspectives based on the complex realities on the ground.
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Community Engaged Scholarship (CES) aims to develop mutually beneficial relationships between educational and research institutions and communities. In this project, we understand CES as a commitment to engaging in projects which acknowledge power imbalances and give space to discuss aspects of diversity, decolonization and inclusion with students engaged within them. With many projects being organized in the community as part of Occupational Therapy education, it is important to reflect on the ethics within working with communities, and the role of educators in facilitating them.This workshop is hosted by a group which aims to develop a resource toolkit for occupational therapy educators engaging with communities in education. The toolkit aims to facilitate critical reflection prior to and during community projects on aspects related to organizational issues and theoretical perspectives, as well as critically examining the curriculum, including the hidden curriculum. The workshop will present the findings of a pedagogical project which examined current experiences of students and teachers who have been involved in community projects as part of occupational therapy education grounded in multiple international settings. Participants will engage with the findings, discussing them in a fishbowl format and their relation to potential future guidelines for an educators’ tool-kit.
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City labs are a promising form of smart governance, providing a ‘smart interface’ between public and private actors, including citizens, through co-creation. Recent scholarship sees ‘experimentation’ - implementing projects with the goal to learn rather than to achieve a predetermined outcome – as a key feature of city labs and their contribution to the adaptability of an urban region. However, in practice, city lab practitioners struggle with this role and need guidance on how to set up, carry out and learn from experiments. TEK4Labs aims to enhance scientific understanding of the conditions required for city labs to take up their experimental role in governance successfully, as well as to provide practical guidance for city labs by developing an ‘experiment kit’. The project will take a transdisciplinary action research approach, combining literature review, survey and interview methods with co-creation design workshops and field testing involving city lab practitioners. TEK4Labs will be carried out by ICIS-UM researchers in collaboration with Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie and its network of Dutch city labs.
