Foto: Stefano Vigorelli, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cafe Bar Filiberto, Buenos Aires

Argentina is notorious for its recurring macroeconomic crises. It has been engulfed in a particularly severe one since 2018. The poverty rate currently stands at 40%, the national currency is continuously losing its value, and, above all, the inflation has become sky-high, reaching 95% in 2022. It follows that many Argentines consider themselves resilient people capable of skilfully navigating political and economic adversities (while suffering on the way). Simultaneously, the political discourse promotes imaginaries of a resilient Argentine society that can withstand hardship, while making questionable promises of growth and prosperity. But what do these self-perceptions and social imaginaries of resilience actually mean, and what kinds of collective behaviours do they translate into?

Social resilience tends to be defined as a community’s capacity to cope with and recover from adversity. It is often associated with social capital and cohesion, and cooperation. Yet I argue that social resilience may also relate to practices that imply undoing the cohesive structures that bind the community together, such as emigrating –or, minimally, aspiring to emigrate. Oscillating between the aspiration to leave, usually for Spain or Italy, and the social pressure to stay currently characterizes the Argentine psychosocial landscape. This makes it a particularly interesting context for analysing the complexity of social resilience and its meanings to people in practice. Thus, I suggest that rather than deeming it simply a capacity, we should consider social resilience as a context-specific and dynamic process that accommodates seemingly contradictory stances, actions, and aspirations.

Speaker:

Sara Kauko is a postdoctoral researcher in Lund University, where she works both in the Department of Gender Studies and in the Social Resilience Research Initiative, Faculty of Social Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Emory University, U.S., in 2020. Her research interests include socioeconomic mobility and economic crises in Argentina, gender and entrepreneurialism, and social resilience. Currently, she is working on a project that examines how, in the context of Argentina’s current economic crisis, microentrepreneur women balance between their double roles as small-scale businesswomen and as mothers, wives, and caretakers. Argentina has been her research site since 2014. But for more than twenty years, it has been her second home.