• Skip to content
  • Skip to footer
  • Accessibility options
University of Brighton
  • About us
  • Business and
    employers
  • Alumni and
    supporters
  • For
    students
  • For
    staff
  • Accessibility
    options
Open menu
Home
Home
  • Close
  • Study here
    • Courses and subjects
    • Find a course
    • A-Z course list
    • Explore our subjects
    • Academic departments
    • Visiting the university
    • Explore: get to know us
    • Upcoming events
    • Virtual tours
    • Chat to our students and staff
    • Open days
    • Applicant days
    • Order a prospectus
    • Ask a question
    • Studying here
    • Accommodation and locations
    • Applying
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Transferring from another university
    • The Student Contract
    • Clearing
    • International students
    • Fees and finance
    • Advice and help
    • Advice for students
    • Advice for parents and carers
    • Advice for schools and teachers
    • Managing your application
    • Undergraduate
    • Postgraduate
    • Apprenticeships
  • Research
    • Research and knowledge exchange
    • Research and knowledge exchange organisation
    • The Global Challenges
    • Centres of Research Excellence (COREs)
    • Research Excellence Groups (REGs)
    • Our research database
    • Information for business
    • Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP)
    • Postgraduate research degrees
    • PhD research disciplines and programmes
    • PhD funding opportunities and studentships
    • How to apply for your PhD
    • Research environment
    • Investing in research careers
    • Strategic plan
    • Research concordat
    • News, events, publications and films
    • Featured research and knowledge exchange projects
    • Research and knowledge exchange news
    • Inaugural lectures
    • Research and knowledge exchange publications and films
    • Academic staff search
  • About us
  • Business and employers
  • Alumni, supporters and giving
  • Current students
  • Staff
  • Accessibility
Search our site
Banner showing symbols of human resilience through creative and research practice including hand printed green heart and purple bird, lantern modelling and banner-making
Centre of Resilience for Social Justice
  • What we do
  • Join us for study, work and visit
  • Who we are
  • What is Resilience Research?

What we do

The Centre of Resilience for Social Justice, together with its social network organisation, Boingboing, is committed to developing research, entrepreneurial practice and impacts which improve the world by addressing health, social and ecological inequalities and challenges.

Our resilience research community includes international academics and community partners from many countries including Australia, Canada, Greece, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, Sweden and Wales. The work of our area connects strongly with the work of the Community University Partnership Programme (CUPP).

Our work brings research-based resources and initiatives to communities seeking to beat and change the odds that are against them. 

Find out how to join us as a member, student, collaborator or visitor

Our areas of focus within resilience research

Centre members openly acknowledge that there are diverse interpretations of the concept of resilience. Primarily though, for our members, systems-based resilience involves internal and external factors that contribute to an individual’s or community’s capacity to positively respond to adversity.

We have four broad academic themes, with our researchers often working across several or all these fields:

  • Child and family resilience research
  • Resilience approach with vulnerable adults
  • Role resilience research and workforce development
  • Systems resilience research

Child and family resilience research

Mechanisms of resilience that are effective in childhood provide vital coping and integrative practices for healthy adult lives. The Centre of Resilience for Social Justice improves the lives of young people through a deeper understanding of the way communities and individuals develop and deploy supportive frameworks, and works directly with them to implement exemplary change.

We work to put our research findings into practice, mobilising academic knowledge alongside people’s lived expertise. This includes theoretical, analytical methodologies and we also organise intervention through a range of projects that involve young lives from birth to adolescence. The Resilience Framework we have developed emphasises the importance of the social and the individual working together to improve the odds for young people. To support this we work at the interface of development and systems models, with expertise not only from healthcare, but also art and design practices, human geography, socio-political studies and education.

The Centre of Resilience for Social Justice aims to promote different forms of community-building that ignite imagination about the future and help to build resilience and a momentum for change. Also building on ideas of Resilient Therapy (RT) to develop and apply new ways of working with disadvantaged children, we seek to make changes that are sustainable and which support the most disadvantaged families.

Resilient Therapy grew out of resilience research carried out by Hart, Blincow and Thomas (2007) and is a way of working with disadvantaged children, young people and their families, in order to help them overcome adversity, literally to ‘bounce back’), adhering to four key principles or noble truths: ‘Accepting’, ‘Conserving’, ‘Commitment’ and ‘Enlisting’ and to five conceptual arenas: ‘Basics’, ‘Belonging’, ‘Learning’, ‘Coping’ and ‘Core Self’.

Through this and with a history of research experience and community intervention we work with schools to ensure that resilience frameworks are conceptually sound, co-produced with schools, including parents and students, grounded in an inequalities imagination and, ultimately, steer away from a simplistic reliance on strengthening children’s individual characteristics.

To achieve these ends, the centre has co-developed Boingboing as a nimble, responsive organisation to operate through academic and practical means directly with the public as advisors, organisers and researchers. This has enabled us to take up opportunities unachievable solely through the university, for example in our contract to support resilience approaches across the town of Blackpool.

Resilient Therapy

Collaborative research with practitioners’ parents and young people led to the development of Resilient Therapy (RT) - an approach to building resilience in disadvantaged families. The RT model has been adopted by 10 local authorities in England as well as local and national charities as part of their service provision.

The RT approach has had international impact and has changed the design, delivery and evaluation of services for young people and families in Crete and Sweden. Curriculum changes have been implemented on university courses in Germany, and Hart has developed a new way of supporting disadvantaged children in Greece.

The Facilitated Academic Resilience Approach

The Facilitated Academic Resilience Approach (F-ARA) is a partnership between academics, policy makers, practitioners, parents/carers and young people. F-ARA aims to build personal and collective resilience in schools through involving all members of the school community in recognising and tackling inequalities and promoting mental health.

An offshoot of the web-based ARA (the Academic Resilience Approach), F-ARA is a free resource for schools developed with schools, funded by the Department of Education. F-ARA is changing the odds for children and young people across the school community. Evaluated pilots have reported success in 35 schools to date, and the intervention requires evaluating to see if it works beyond these pilot areas.

Schools and children’s mental health commissioners are asking for increasing numbers of F-ARA interventions, with 10 local authorities having had support so far and over 100 schools involved. Evaluations suggest that the resource supports schools to help the most disadvantaged children and build resilience across the school community. National charity YoungMinds have implemented the ARA through their national training programme.

Some of our achievements in child and family resilience

Our work with children's resilience is internationally recognised and continues to bring life-changing opportunities in Britain and around the world.

Some of our proudest moments include:

  • Patterns of resilience among young people in a community affected by drought
  • Resilient Therapy and the Resilience Framework
  • The Resilience Revolution with Blackpool Headstart

Join us in this work

We welcome contact with anyone who can benefit from our work with children, families and disadvantaged communities. Our Academic Resilience resources are available on the Boingboing website. 

We also welcome contact from those who would like to take their interest in childhood and family resilience to the next level through PhD research study in resilience.

A child's painting of the earth and stars.

Resilience approach with vulnerable adults

The efficacy and sustainability of care and progress with vulnerable adults relies on effective resilience frameworks.

Vulnerability can be witnessed in those who have suffered through illness, poverty, disrupted education, or criminal activity. How society nurtures the resilience it provides is dependent on the knowledge base of proven successes and the instigation of new, creative and rigorously researched methods. 

People with long term conditions such as cardio-metabolic disorders (heart disease, diabetes), neuro-degenerative disorders (multiple sclerosis etc.), cancers, muscular-skeletal problems or AIDS are frequently confronted with difficult self-care regimens (poly-pharmacy, lifestyle adjustments), worries about the future, social stigma and discrimination.

While resilience research in this area is in its infancy, we have collected questionnaire data on people who are generally healthy, but may suffer from poor emotional health (anxiety and depressive symptoms) and who may have experienced stressful events in early life. Ongoing research projects are investigating resilience in young adults and in adolescents with type 1 diabetes. We are very interested in how social support and peers can be helpful (or unhelpful) to the person living with diabetes.

Some of our achievements in working with vulnerable adults

  • Resilience to reoffending, 'Changing Lanes'
  • Nothing about us without us: civic activism as a mental health intervention.

We welcome contact through resilience@brighton.ac.uk with those interested in academic collaboration or support for PhD, postgraduate research study, in the area of resilience for and with vulnerable adults as part of PhD research study in resilience.

A group of young people on Brighton beach at sunset, one is holding a bunch of balloons.

Role resilience research and workforce development

As part of a holistic approach to the evolution and sustainability of effective resilience practices, we recognise the lynchpin role of these within cycles of employment. Strong practices established in these environments will percolate through large sectors of society and the evidence of best practice allows impactful measures to be advised upon and taken.

Projects based on our research help develop the resilience of practitioners and leaders who further promote environmental resilience. This work supports individuals, sustainable service provision, professional education and creates social success in areas of deprivation.

Resilience research has begun to apply resilience-focused concepts to supporting professionals in various fields including education, social work, nursing and midwifery, medicine and across professional groups. Our work follows an ecological-based approach to identify protective mechanisms that enable practitioners to thrive in the face of workplace adversity.

Some of our achievements in resilience for workforce development

  • Conceptualising patient and public engagement and involvement (PPEI) for commissioning and designing health and care services as situated learning.

We welcome contact through resilience@brighton.ac.uk with those interested in academic collaboration or support for PhD, postgraduate research study, in the area of resilience for workforce development as part of PhD research study in resilience.

A small boy sitting on a woman's lap while another woman chats to him depicting resilience research and practice.

Systems resilience research

Critiques of neoliberal resilience point to the political, practical and conceptual dangers of framing resilience as an individualised trait or process. Alongside this, there is growing awareness that whole systems approaches, including coproducing with disadvantaged citizens and communities, need to be taken to solve our most pressing problems both in the UK and worldwide.

The centre draws in people from local, national and international systems in pursuit of a shared vision as we develop approaches and explore the concepts of collective and community resilience.

We are particularly interested in the degree to which the concept of resilience can be drawn upon in promoting a sense of collective action and identity. We have developed the idea of fifth wave resilience research which builds on Masten’s four waves to suggest a more politicised, co-productive and potentially community-oriented notion of resilience. Some of our work explores mass emergency behaviour and celebrates the remarkable resilience that people and communities can show in the face of threat and adversity, taking a critical view of the notion of mass ‘panic’ in disasters, arguing that it almost never happens.

Some of our achievements in systems resilience research

  • The Imagine Programme - researching the potential of community-university partnerships.
  • Building resilience through community arts practice and Realising the potential of collaborative arts-based research, including the Collaborative Poetics Network.
A graphic showing the Resilience framework - rows of pink and blue circles with images of home, family, bicycle etc.

Our research impact and knowledge exchange at the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice

The Centre of Resilience for Social Justice brokers and sustains challenging, complex and mutually beneficial community-university co-researcher collaborations. Affecting policy change is at the core of our research strategy, making maximum impact from the simultaneous mobilisation of knowledge, enterprise and activism.

The co-productive basis to all our work means that centre members are regularly invited to give public lectures, media appearances, training and workshops to non-governmental organisations, government and other policy makers to promote the potential of existing research and co-develop further projects.

Members have developed a unique social enterprise and network, BoingBoing, which acts as our main pathway to impact. We excel at brokering and sustaining challenging, complex and mutually beneficial community-university co-researcher collaborations.

Our commitment to impact in resilience research

Our commitment is to developing research, entrepreneurial practice and impacts which improve the world by addressing health, social and ecological inequalities and challenges. Centre members openly acknowledge that there are diverse interpretations of the concept of resilience. We harness this tension as a creative and stimulating force and, as a centre, propose systems-based resilience which involves internal and external factors that contribute to an individual’s or community’s capacity to positively respond to adversity. Resilience is only meaningful if understood as relating to a whole ecological or financial system.

Affecting policy change is key for us, for example influencing NHS England to ensure that the resilience approaches they promote adopt our inequalities perspectives.

Defining and measuring resilience

Resilience is best recognised as the end state of a successful negotiation of adversity based on both adaptive characteristics of the individual and the supporting environment. Measuring resilience directly has been seen by many leading resilience researchers as a very complicated task. However, measuring the positive attributes of the individual and the supporting environment is possible, and several researchers have developed measures of protective factors that show promise.

Our colleague at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Odin Hjemdal, has spent the last 10 years developing two resilience measures, one for adults (Resilience Scale for Adults; RSA) and one for young people (Resilience Scale for Adolescents; READ). These measures draw on the large base of results from resilience research and measure both individual positive attributes like: personal competences and attribution styles, social competences, goal orientation, self-efficacy and realistic optimistic views on the future as well as adaptive family environment and positive social resources outside the family. He is working with us to explore ways of measuring levels of protection in the disadvantaged children and families we work with.

Who we work with in the UK

Headstart Blackpool

Working with Blackpool Council, we are facilitating aspects of the HeadStart programme to support the mental health of children and young people in Blackpool using a community development approach to embed our Resilient Therapy methods across the town. We are drawing on both resilience and systems theory to work alongside practitioners, parents and young people to build a more resilience-based way of working using a common language. We are supporting others in the UK to develop resilience stuff too.

Newport Mind 

We provide training to Newport Mind on resilience and provide supervision to their family workers. Newport Mind is an active partner on many of our joint research projects with the University of Brighton, including the Imagine Programme and our Q-Sort Project.

Young Minds

YoungMinds is a charity who are committed to improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people. They have adopted the centre's Academic Resilience Approach that Professor Angie Hart developed with Lisa Williams, and schools and organisations including YoungMinds have provided a sounding board and testing ground for the approach. YoungMinds provide training in the Academic Resilience Approach through their own train the trainer model.

Who we work with internationally: Communities of Practice around the world

Crete

With Boingboing academic members in Crete, we have established communities of practices (CoPs) concerned with understanding, applying and developing resilience theory and practices to support school children with complex needs.

One CoP is formed of teachers, social workers, psychologists, school counsellors, academic researchers, and other related specialists. A second CoP included parents of children with psychosocial difficulties and related complex needs.

The CoPs draw on the Resilience framework and consider how the framework could be adapted to be effective in the Greek cultural context. Read more about the ESRC funded Developing resilience approaches for school children in Crete.

Germany

Working with Boingboing academic colleagues in University of Osnabrück, Germany, we established a Community of Practice (CoP) concerned with understanding, applying and developing resilience theory and practices to support school children with complex needs, social emotional difficulties and disabilities.

South Africa

Collaborating closely with international partners including Khulisa Social Solutions and leading academics in the UK, South Africa and Canada we aim to improve understanding about what enables young people in the municipality of Govan Mbeki to withstand, adapt to, resist and cope with the physical and mental impacts of drought.

Read more about the cross-funded project Resilience among young people in a community affected by drought.

A photograph of a dry desert landscape in the grip of a drought.

Our research publications, outputs and projects

Details of research publications and other outputs fostered by the centre and achieved by its members, along with funded projects delivered by the centre, can be accessed on the centre's database of research. 

  • Visit the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice overview page on our research database

  • Visit the record of our research publications and other outputs

  • Visit the record of our funded research projects

Visit our institutional record of research outputs and projects.

Back to top
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn icon

Contact us

University of Brighton
Mithras House
Lewes Road
Brighton
BN2 4AT

Main switchboard 01273 600900

Course enquiries

Sign up for updates

University contacts

Report a problem with this page

Quick links Quick links

  • Courses
  • Open days
  • Order a prospectus
  • Academic departments
  • Academic staff
  • Professional services departments
  • Jobs
  • Privacy and cookie policy
  • Accessibility statement
  • Libraries
  • Term dates
  • Maps
  • Graduation
  • Site information
  • Online shop
  • COVID-19

Information for Information for

  • Current students
  • International students
  • Media/press
  • Careers advisers/teachers
  • Parents/carers
  • Business/employers
  • Alumni/supporters
  • Suppliers
  • Local residents