Matthias Lindner

dapted for Times of Crisis? An Interdisciplinary Critique of the Individualized Concept of Resilience. This essay critiques the dominant understanding of resilience as an individual trait shaped by neoliberal demands for self-optimization. Drawing on Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach, Clemens Sedmak’s notion of epistemic resilience, and Julian Nida-Rümelin’s theory of authorship, it proposes a relational framework that situates resilience within socio-structural conditions. Resilience, it argues, is not a purely psychological capacity but emerges through political infrastructures, institutional arrangements, and normative expectations. Social work serves as a paradigmatic field in which resilience is operationalized – both as a demand on clients and a burden on professionals. In this context, resilience risks becoming a moralized mechanism that shifts responsibility away from systemic conditions toward the individual. The chapter calls for a conceptual shift: resilience should not signal compliance or coping, but institutional accountability and social justice. Reframing resilience in this way resists the privatization of crisis and reclaims it as a collective, ethically grounded imperative.