Conceptualizing Social Resilience in Migrants’ Lived Experiences
What does it really mean for migrants to be “resilient”? Too often, resilience is described as an individual skill or capacity, overlooking the fact that it is also a deeply social process shaped by relationships, institutions, and lived experiences. This article rethinks social resilience as lived experience of migrants.
Focusing on a life course perspective, the article introduces four interconnected dimensions of social resilience—status, networks, support, and visibility—that reveal how migrants adapt and transform their lives within political, economic, cultural, and social constraints. Rather than treating resilience as a fixed trait, the article highlights it as a dynamic, socially constructed phenomenon that emerges in community practices and institutional interactions.
By centering migrants’ lived experiences, the article invites readers to see resilience not as a buzzword, but as a lens for understanding inclusion, agency, and the everyday negotiations of life in a new society.
This post summarizes the following article:
Qamar, A. H. (2023). Conceptualizing social resilience in the context of migrants’ lived experiences. Geoforum, 139, 103680.
Rethinking Resilience: Why Migrants’ Everyday Lives Matter
Resilience is often seen as the ability to cope and “bounce back” after difficulties, but researchers argue this view is too limited. In today’s changing world—shaped by climate change, modernization, and migration—resilience should also mean “bouncing ahead,” adapting and progressing rather than just returning to the past.
Defining resilience only as a fixed ability ignores the diverse social experiences and practices that shape it. Universal theories risk overlooking local knowledge and cultural contexts. This article instead explores resilience through migrants’ lived experiences in host countries.
Migrants move from hardship to stability, learning and adapting along the way. Their experiences show how personal choices interact with wider social, political, and cultural environments. A life course perspective—which studies how lives unfold over time—can enrich migration research, though it is not yet widely used.
Rethinking Resilience in Migration
By the late 20th century, resilience was mainly seen as an individual trait—like self-esteem, temperament, or cognitive ability—that helped people cope with adversity. This “heroic resilience” view has been criticized for focusing too much on personal strength while ignoring the role of institutions, social structures, and practices.
Social resilience, however, is more complex and dynamic. Quantitative studies often generalize environmental factors but overlook the lived, changing social dimensions of resilience. A social constructionist approach instead views resilience as something shaped by context and relationships.
For migrants, resilience is tied to their everyday experiences and actions as they adapt to new environments. It can be understood through two linked ideas: social experience (how migrants perceive and live in their environment) and social practice (how they respond to challenges).
Most migration studies still emphasize push–pull factors or personal/community resources, but they rarely examine migrants’ lived social experiences and practices as part of their transformative journeys in host countries.
Social Resilience: Constructionist Perspective
Social resilience shifts focus from individual traits to the interaction between people and their environments—moving from “I” to “we.” Adger defined it as the ability of individuals, groups, or communities to withstand shocks, shaped by livelihoods, resources, and institutions within changing socio-political contexts. Building on this, resilience can also be seen as socially constructed, tied to lived experiences and reflective agency.
Recent studies view resilience as a complex, interdisciplinary process influenced by social, political, and cultural contexts. Ungar’s socio-ecological approach highlights resilience as culturally embedded, emphasizing principles like decentring (person–environment focus), complexity, atypicality, and cultural relativity. His work shows how young people’s perspectives and environments shape resilience pathways.
Because human experience is layered and dynamic, quantitative measures often miss the meaning-making processes behind resilience. Qualitative, participant-centered research helps capture these lived experiences, showing resilience as diverse, evolving, and context-specific.
Social resilience develops through time via person–environment interactions, supported by cultural practices, social networks, relationships, and community values. It is deeply embedded in political, economic, and cultural contexts, where environmental factors and resources shape adaptation and transformation. As an interdisciplinary construct, social resilience should include community dynamics, adaptability, and broader socio-cultural and political dimensions.
A social phenomenon characterized by vulnerable individuals’ or groups’ social experiences and social practices in the face of political, economic, cultural, and social (PECS) environmental changes and challenges. Individuals or groups going through this experience learn to re-examine their lives in the new context and shape their adaptive and transformational capabilities (Qamar, 2023)
Social Resilience and Migrants’ Lived Experiences
Resilience varies across contexts, and migration—whether voluntary or forced—creates major life changes. Migrants face disrupted families, limited resources, communication barriers, and shifting responsibilities. These challenges create a “new normal,” where migrants must adapt, re-examine life’s meaning, and undergo personal and social transformation.
A life-course perspective helps explain these experiences by focusing on continuity, turning points, and interdependence over time. It situates resilience as a social phenomenon shaped by migrants’ lived experiences and their interaction with political, economic, cultural, and social (PECS) environments.
Migrants’ vulnerability—linked to marginalization, racism, restricted access, or political invisibility—plays a central role. Social resilience emerges through four key aspects:
- Status (legal and employment position)
- Access (to resources via family, community, and networks)
- Support (protection and social networks)
- Visibility (being recognized as active members of society)
These factors influence inclusion, exclusion, and integration. Migrants’ resilience develops at the intersection of social structures and lived experiences, evolving as they adapt to challenges.
Stressors in host countries—such as language barriers, cultural adjustment, legal uncertainty, and limited services—can undermine well-being. Yet, social support from governments, communities, and social workers strengthens resilience by expanding networks, improving access, and enhancing migrants’ ability to adapt and transform in their new environments.
Conclusions
Social resilience, once seen simply as the capacity to respond to challenges, has developed into a multidimensional concept focused on learning and adaptability. In the context of migration, it is shaped by interconnected social, cultural, economic, and political factors.
Migrants’ resilience is influenced by four key aspects of their social experience: status, networks, support, and visibility. Recognizing resilience as a socially constructed phenomenon gives migrants a voice and highlights how their lived experiences interact with broader structures.
Through engagement with PECS (political, economic, cultural, and social) factors, migrants adapt and “bounce ahead” into a new normal, developing transformational capabilities in the process.