Oral Presentation by Öykü Kuran¹, Reşit Kışlıoğlu²
¹ Başkent University, Türkiye ² Başkent University, Turkey
TIME: Tuesday, 14 July, 10:30 – 12:00
Location: Room 3
Session: 3
Abstract
Resilience is understood in terms of adaptability, inner strength, flourishing, and the ability to bounce back in mainstream psychology (Ryff & Singer, 2003; Baumgardner & Crothers, 2009). It is predominantly presented as a desirable personal quality, a fundamental resource that enables individuals to cope with challenges during a crisis. Even though this approach emphasizes agency and well-being, as preferred within the neoliberal context in which we live, it rarely interrogates the socio-political conditions that require, demand, and valorize resilience. Instead, this study will examine how resilience discourse is shaped within neoliberal ideology and how it operates in contexts of increasing precarity (Schwarz, 2018; Gill & Orgad, 2018; Espinosa Zepeda, 2021; Oliva et al, 2022). Within neoliberal rationalities, imperatives of personal empowerment and self-management transform structural precarity into a growth imperative (Adams et al., 2019). Drawing on theories of critical psychology (Teo, 2018; Bettache et al., 2020), this study will examine resilience beyond an individual psychological concept. Precisely, the term will be elaborated as a historically situated construct, reorganizing responsibility for coping. Using Norman Fairclough’s (2015) three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis, the research will analyze focus group discussions conducted with soon-to-graduate university students, fresh graduates, and early-career professionals in Türkiye: groups who are centrally positioned within contemporary conditions of economic insecurity, competition, and uncertainty. The analysis will examine how participants reflect on coping, success, and endurance in academic and professional contexts; how resilience is linguistically constructed in everyday conversation; and how themes of vulnerability, mutual support, and collective solidarity are articulated, marginalized, or silenced. The study is guided by one central question: Does the emphasis on personal empowerment within resilience discourse naturalize and sustain structural injustice by shifting responsibility from systemic conditions to individual self-management? By situating young people’s experiences within broader relations of power, work, and ideology, this study will contribute to critical psychology’s effort to re-politicize well-being and to reclaim vulnerability and interdependence as potential grounds for collective resistance rather than objects of individual adaptation.