Call for papers for the track Resilience, Social Structures and Transformation at the conference International Conference of Resilience Systems
Date/deadline: Wednesday, 27 August 2025, noon CEST.
This track aims to strengthen the dialogue between current approaches to resilience systems (i.e., Complex Adaptive Systems) and debates in contemporary sociological theory and ethics to refine both explanatory and normative approaches for steering resilience toward social transformation.
Conference dates: March 23-25, 2026, Delft (The Netherlands)
Website: https://www.icrs26.org/resilience-social-structures-and-transformation
Contact: c.a.benitezavila@tudelft.nl
Keynote track panellist:
The track will be opened by Dr. Karim Knio (International Institute of Social Studies) and Prof. Leigh Price (University of Inland Norway)*, who will introduce realist sociological theory as an approach to understanding the interplay between resilience and sociocultural structures. Prof. Neelke Doorn (Delft University of Technology)* will respond with commentary, reflecting on the normative implications of such an approach.
(*) To be confirmed
Resilience, Social Structures and Transformation.
Resilience literature increasingly recognizes that socio-technical and environmental systems are embedded within normative, power-laden, and societal contexts. This “social turn” in resilience discourse has prompted researchers to frame resilience not just as persistence or recovery, but as a path to social transformation. As a result, practitioners are encouraged to clarify the type of “resilience society” they seek to foster through their interventions: one that contributes to addressing deep-rooted sociocultural structures that perpetuate inequality, racial discrimination, and injustice. Nevertheless, resilience approaches have not yet fully developed a theory or clearly defined how resilience interacts with social and cultural structures, which limits our understanding of both its potential for transformation and its normative implications.
Contributors are asked to elaborate explanatory and normative frameworks to answer the following questions:
Normative questions:
- What kinds of socio-cultural transformation trajectories might be desirable for shaping the design, management, and governance of socio-technical and environmental resilience systems?
- Which processes in resilience design and practice favour participation and deliberation for social transformation, and which ones prevent it or discourage it?
- Which deliberative strategies can be employed to foster collective agency and awareness of socio-cultural embeddedness among actors confronting shocks and stresses?
- What responsibility arrangements or frameworks are best suited for desirable transformation in societies exposed to shocks and stresses?
Explanatory questions:
- How to theorize the socio-economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the structural contexts in which socio-technical and environmental systems operate?
- How do social and cultural structures influence the adaptation capacity of people within socio-technical and environmental systems when faced with shocks and stresses?
- What are the mechanisms by which socio-technical and environmental resilience contribute to the persistence or transformation of social and cultural structures?
Important dates
Submission deadlines
From July 2025: submission open
August 27, 2025: submission deadline
Registration deadlines
(forthcoming)
Date of event
March 23-25, 2026
Chairs:
Dr Camilo Andres Benitez Avila (Delft University of Technology – The Netherlands)
Dr Juan David Parra Heredia (International Institute of Social Science – The Netherlands
Dr. Jose Carlos Cañizares Gaztelu (Universidad de Sevilla – Spain)
Dr. Samantha Copeland (Delft University of Technology – The Netherlands)