The Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Centre for Interdisciplinary Resilience Studies is unique for its systems-oriented, cohort-based approach to examining and understanding resilience across a rich diversity of contexts.
The current global moment has been described as one of “polycrisis”, characterised by cascades of environmental, social, political, economic, and health-related disruption. Polycrisis demands that humanity build greater resilience into ecosystems, people, societies, and cultures. Addressing that challenge requires interdisciplinary thought-leaders with the formal training, critical acumen, and inspired creativity to investigate, interpret, and inform resilience in its many dimensions.
Resilience describes both elasticity and brittleness in response to disruption. When researchers can explain the underlying mechanisms of resilience in a given system, they also shed light on resilience in other contexts. Research into one resilience puzzle collectively improves research into all resilience puzzles. This relationship between specific and general makes the study of resilience both intellectually exciting and societally vital.
Our programme uses resilience as a unifying concept for organising discourses, concepts, and methods otherwise splintered across academic disciplines, so that fundamental insights into systemic societal challenges will emerge from cross-disciplinary exchange and synthesis.
A distinguishing feature of our programme is its deliberate embedding of arts, humanities, and social-sciences perspectives into resilience discourse. Sharing approaches and methods across different disciplines will promote creativity and build the common understanding necessary to tackle societal grand challenges.
To deliver its vision and a lasting legacy of impactful scholars and scholarship, our programme offers a liberal-arts educational model in which students progress through an interdisciplinary curriculum while also developing discipline-specific expertise.