Conceptions of Resilience: Compliance or Transformation?

Abstract This paper offers a philosophical inquiry into conceptions of resilience-identifying it first as a set of individual traits or characteristics Educational literature that focuses on risk factors as inhibitors to students' academic success has come under attack as fundamentally negative in its approach to certain students Several issues and concerns, related both to the meaning and purpose of resilience, call for a philosophical inquiry. Noticeably absent from resilience literature are two fundamental questions: resilient for what purpose, and resilient according to whom? Conceptions of resilience that fail to address these issues-either as individual capacities or as relational phenomena-are problematic on a number of levels: first, notion