New workshop: Resisting Required Resilience
LET’S recently developed a new workshop, Resisting Required Resilience, for the EngiQueers Conference. The conference organizers initially approached LET’S about presenting on resilience, a theme that is often celebrated in conversations about equity-denied communities. In response, LET’S Founder–Executive Director, Heather McCain (they/them), shared that they might be an outlier on the term “resilience,” naming discomfort with how disabled, neurodivergent, and other equity-denied people are frequently congratulated for surviving conditions they had no real choice in, would rather not have lived through, and that are the direct result of systemic failure.
Grounded in this critique, Resisting Required Resilience invites participants to question narratives that romanticize “overcoming” harm instead of addressing the systems that create it. The workshop explores how resilience language can place responsibility on individuals rather than institutions, and offers alternative ways to talk about support, interdependence, and structural change. By reframing resilience, LET’S encourages participants to shift focus from praising survival to building conditions where people are not continually forced to be “resilient” just to get basic needs met.
Workshop Description:
People often congratulate equity-denied people for being “so resilient. It is meant as a compliment but for many of us – disabled, neurodivergent, 2SLGBTQIA+, immigrants, racialized, and other equity-denied identities – it covers the deeper truth, that resilience is a necessary reality thrust on us by systems, structures, and people that continually fail us.
In this workshop, we will discuss the language of resilience through a Disability Justice lens. We will explore how the narrative of “resilience” often shifts responsibility onto individuals and communities and off the systems requiring it.
This session is not about teaching people how to be more resilient, it’s about challenging why they have to be so resilient in the 1st place.
Participants will:
- Examine how the concept of resilience shows up in everyday language and practice.
- Explore how systemic barriers make resilience a necessity rather than a choice.
- Reflect on how “resilience” connects directly with the need for a disability justice framework with principles like collective access, interdependence, and collective care.
- Discussing the right that people have not to be resilient. Fragility, vulnerability, need for community, and interdependence are aspects of being human – not personal failures.
- Explore concepts like collective care, mutual aid, and collective access, recognizing that no one should have to earn rest, support, or safety by proving their endurance.