At the Autumn School, each FRONT professor delivered a lecture exploring the intersection between their discipline and the concept of resilience over the four days of the course. The lectures covered:
The early career researchers came from variety of disciplines, universities and nationalities, and got a chance to work in groups in between the lectures.
Resilience is very relevant concept in many ways in the field of psychology, where I have my background. Traditionally, resilience in psychology has been seen as a concept describing various factors that help an individual to stay ‘resilient’ – often referring to the ability to maintain subjective (psychological) wellbeing when encountering adverse life events. My own research explores how young people cope with conflicts (be they social, structural or internal) they experience when trying to make more sustainable choices in their everyday lives.
Therefore, in terms of resilience, I think my focus is less on adaptation and more on transformation: I see coping strategies as important resilience factors that help young people deal with conflicts, which can be viewed as a way to create new pathways towards sustainability transformation through individual everyday life choices. Although these choices happen in an individual level, they do not happen in a vacuum. This is why, in our research group, we talk about socio-ecological resilience.
From Autumn school I was expecting to hear insightful lectures from fields outside of my own that could help me connect new perspectives to my own research but also to widen my understanding on resilience in general. Of course, I was also looking forward to meet other early-career researchers and to contact with new and familiar people.
I think the most transformational teaching from the Autumn school was to teach my brain to think differently and to connect the perspectives from fields different from my own. Maybe the key message for me was to be open and curious for what other fields have to provide - since the best ideas form when we need to think differently and not get stuck to reading and hearing only from people in our own field. I guess there’s some truth in all the clichés about comfort zones? And I do not imply here that Autumn school was uncomfortable!
I was most surprised about how I found that my own field, psychology, could use so many different perspectives from other fields focusing on resilience. After the Autumn school I absolutely find it easier to build multidisciplinary research. Autumn school gave me new ideas to develop in the future, and the courage to think more broadly without limiting to one research field – at least in theory.
I am a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Marketing, Management, and International Business. My research examines resilience in business relationships and wider networks. Accordingly, the concept of resilience is central to my work, offering a valuable lens for understanding how organizations adapt and respond to change together. Resilience is a concept that spans multiple disciplines, each of which approaches it differently. Through this course I hoped to gain a deeper understanding of these diverse conceptualizations, enabling me to incorporate broader perspectives into my own analysis and to enrich my research with insights from other fields.
One key insight was that, within the business field, resilience is often taken for granted and rarely critically examined. I found it particularly valuable to see how other disciplines critique the tendency to frame resilience primarily as coping, rather than as addressing or solving underlying challenges, such as climate change. This perspective has encouraged me to reflect more critically on the way resilience is applied in business research.
I was struck by the critical perspectives other disciplines bring to the concept of resilience. While this is entirely natural, as a marketing researcher I had tended to view resilience primarily from my own disciplinary standpoint. Engaging with these alternative perspectives was both enlightening and a constructive challenge, broadening my understanding of the concept.
Multidisciplinary research is inherently challenging, requiring not only an understanding of others’ approaches and conceptual frameworks but also careful coordination of research efforts. Nevertheless, the Autumn School demonstrated that meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration is possible, particularly when there is a shared interest, as we collectively had in exploring resilience. This experience has reinforced my confidence in engaging with research across disciplinary boundaries.
My research focuses on the psychological response of young people to climate change and various ecological crises in Chile. Specifically, I am examining the phenomenon of eco-anxiety, understood as the growing distress related to current environmental issues and potential future impacts. Based on my research, I have found that psychological resilience plays a crucial role, particularly in relation to coping strategies that enable individuals to manage present and anticipated adversities stemming from these environmental challenges.
In this context, meaning-based coping strategies, grounded in challenging sources of hope, are essential for maintaining sustained ecological engagement in the long term, in line with the considerations of Professor Maria Ojala. From my perspective, these aspects are fundamental in effectively addressing both eco-anxiety and the psychological resilience of youth in the future.
I anticipated that it would be a multidisciplinary learning space aimed at fostering exchange with international experts in the field of resilience. This expectation was fully met, as the opportunity to interact with professionals approaching resilience from diverse perspectives—such as engineering, architecture, geography, and others—allowed me to broaden my critical perspective within my own field.
Additionally, it helped me understand the inherent complexity in using the same concept of "resilience" across different disciplines, where it acquires specific and contextualized meanings, highlighting the importance of an integrated and multidimensional approach.
I was surprised by two different perspectives on the concept of resilience. The first, equitable resilience, proposed in the Autumn School by Professor Elina Lehtomäki, critiques traditional notions of resilience by recognizing the existence of inequalities in power and resources. This view aims not only at recovery from adversity but also at promoting social justice. This approach is particularly relevant in Latin American contexts, especially in Chile, where indigenous peoples continue to be oppressed by industries and multinational companies on natural territories they are protecting, highlighting the need to address resilience from a social justice perspective.
On the other hand, the concept of democratic resilience seemed highly pertinent from a political and sociological standpoint. It is understood as the capacity of democratic systems to withstand crises and external and internal stressors in a non-violent manner through democratic mechanisms of political participation. This approach is especially relevant for consideration in contexts of social and political crisis. From a critical perspective, the very concept of resilience, within a neoliberal archetypical framework, burdens individuals and local communities with the responsibility to adapt and transform without addressing the need for systemic and large-scale political transformations. This view, besides being unjust, can also be a source of social discontent, as pointed out by Professor Tapio Nykänen.
Among the most revealing conclusions for me is the importance of understanding resilience as a multidimensional and multisystemic phenomenon from a critical perspective. Whether on a micro or macro social level, it is essential to question the idea that individuals should adapt and transform in response to changes that are sometimes not natural, recognizing that each conception of the concept is different and complex. In all disciplines, questioning resilience is relevant in order to address it more effectively and contextually.
I find it somewhat easier to consider multidisciplinary research across different disciplines after the Autumn School lectures and meeting the other researchers. The entire process highlighted how complex and challenging such collaborations can be, given that researchers tend to be highly focused on their specific fields and knowledge. This focus can hinder openness to addressing interdisciplinary topics or engaging with unfamiliar concepts.
However, the experience underscored that successful integration requires significant cognitive flexibility, effective communication skills, and leadership that is open to merging diverse approaches and perspectives into a unified vision. It also became clear that maintaining a balance is crucial to ensure that no discipline loses its voice or perspective during the development of a joint project or solution. The Autumn School provided me with valuable insights into these challenges and proved that, despite the difficulties, building a strong team and fostering collaborative efforts can lead to promising future research opportunities. Overall, the experience has increased my confidence in approaching interdisciplinary work, even recognizing the complexities involved.
My research explores the spatial-temporal dynamics of social-ecological resilience in response to urban flooding. It sits primarily within human geography, analyzing how resilience varies across places and over time.
I hoped to learn how other disciplines frame resilience, spot synergies and differences, and bring those insights back to my project. Because my research is using an interdisciplinary approach, I was looking for some inspiration from the School’s multidisciplinary setting.
Multidisciplinary collaboration was truly interesting and inspiring. Working across fields created unexpected synergies and generated many practical ideas. In the meanwhile, a key challenge is that it takes time to understand perspectives from different disciplines, so being inclusive, patient, and curious is essential.
What took me by surprise was the shared themes across disciplines. One theme was the emphasis on equity / equitable resilience across fields, especially in education and political perspectives, though it was framed differently within each discipline. Another shared emphasis was on multiple scales (micro-meso-macro), each discipline interpreting them differently yet complementarily.
The School’s multidisciplinary resilience setting strengthened my mindset to understand and engage with research across fields. At the same time, groupwork with PhD researchers from different fields gave me hands-on practice in collaborating more effectively, for example by clarifying roles, translating concepts, and building shared outputs.
Writers of this blog post are:
Doctoral researcher Sonja Palmo, Socio-ecological resilience theme, from FRONT research programme at the University of Oulu, whose research areas are psychology, climate change, pro-environmental behaviour, and how young people relate to climate crisis.
Doctoral researcher Merja Kivirinta, Resilient Organizations and Business Networks theme, from FRONT research programme at the University of Oulu. Her research examines how interfirm interactions, both in dyadic business relationships and broader networks, enhance organizational resilience.
Doctoral researcher Tamara Hoffmann, (PhD (c) Psychotherapy, University of Chile with cotutelle agreement with Pontifical Catholic University of Chile/ Psychologist and Master degree/ Internship in the FRONT research programme at the University of Oulu. She studies the psychological response of young people to climate change and various ecological crises in Chile.
Doctoral researcher Ying Liao, Spatial Resilience Research Methods theme in Geography, from FRONT research programme at the University of Oulu. Her research examines the spatiotemporal dynamics of social-ecological resilience in response to urban flooding, focusing on both historical patterns and future projections.
The Exploring resilience blog discusses the current themes of research, teaching and development of resilience, i.e., crisis resistance and deepens knowledge about the management of global change, and possible solutions to the wicked problems of sustainability. The authors are researchers and experts in the field, and members of the cooperation networks of the University of Oulu’s FRONT PROFI7 research programme.