Current approaches to health system resilience tend to prioritize system-level outcomes (e.g. functionality) while overlooking key underlying social processes, contexts, and power-laden interactions through which resilience is produced. When community resilience is subsumed under health system resilience, without attending to distinct contextual factors, it can lead to fragmented approaches or maladaptive outcomes that misalign with the resilience of communities. Therefore, resilience approaches need to include additional methods that incorporate analyses of power structures and context. We propose intersectionality theory as a methodological lens to investigate the underlying social processes and power dynamics that shape community resilience and health system resilience interactions. An intersectionality approach prompts researchers to distinguish how resilience capacity is derived through the involvement of community actors, their unique intersecting social identities, and their lived experiences. Including an intersectional lens in resilience approaches provides researchers with the tools to identify points of practical constraints that arise at the intersection of communities and health systems, with particular attention on the burdens that are placed on community actors.

Urban resilience strategies foster hybrid spaces across bottom-up and top-down urban governance processes for urban planning to include new ways of thinking. However, hybridity, on a more practical level, entails tensions between ways of doing things that do not conventionally operate together but are merged in the implementation of programmes, projects, and initiatives. We illustrate ‘governance’ and ‘implementation’ as different levels of urban organisational hybridity in our case study of Rotterdam, The Netherlands, empirically contrasting urban planning resilience representations against representations emerging during the implementation of its social resilience programme. We find that planning representations at the governance level imagined social resilience to be a result of organisational innovations that would form the basis of the so-called ‘Next Economy’, driven by decentralised renewable energy linked to entrepreneurial communitarian forms of organisation in partnership with public and private sectors. However, implementation reveals frustration due to institutional unfitness and the absence of business cases for attracting private investors to the table. Organisational fixes in response valorise networks of enthusiastic (but discrete and precarious) communitarian initiatives with little connection to large-scale (but centralised and only public–private) gas-free investments. By acknowledging that hybridity works differently at governance and implementation levels, we can avoid urban resilience imaginaries that pose, in practice, the burden of aligning with bureaucratic and profit-oriented logic as a new barrier to enacting inclusive citizenship.

In this chapter, Samantha Copeland explores the relationship between ethics practice and theory and recent work in modelling theory. Starting with model-based reasoning as theorized by Magnani and Nersessian, Copeland draws from recent work on normative modelling as well as recent work on participatory multi-modelling. The parallels reveal both descriptive commonalities as well as grounding normative advice for the practice of ethics in the contemporary world

It is now widely accepted that climate change requires both mitigation actions to reduce climate change and adaptation measures to cope with the effects of climate change, such as increased droughts, heat waves, heavy rainfall, and flooding among others. In recent years, resilience has emerged as one of the leading paradigms for climate adaptation policy. After a first wave of enthusiasm in the literature, resilience is increasingly becoming a contested concept. Not only does the concept lack clarity due to theoretical inconsistencies and ambiguity in its use but definitions of resilience also uniformly portray urban resilience as a desirable goal, which is problematized by research that questions the distribution of benefits and burdens under different resilience regimes. A growing number of scholars now recognize that, for climate adaptation to draw on and benefit in practical ways from a resilience approach, the appropriation and use of resilience to justify policy measures should be critically scrutinized, as it contains particular normative choices that are often not made explicit. Although it is often said that resilience involves new responsibility arrangements between state and local actors, with an increasing emphasis on the responsibilities of citizens, the literature on urban resilience has hitherto devoted limited attention to the responsibilities that citizens are expected to assume under different resilience regimes. A more prominent role for citizens cannot be a simple substitute for responsive and accountable governance. The aim of this chapter is to develop a normative notion of resilience that can account for the responsibilities of different actors in realizing resilience.

Serendipity refers to the combination of “accident” and “sagacity”; an unexpected and unpredicted event which is noticed by an agent with the right skills to make the most of it. Famous examples include Jocelyn Bell’s discovery of pulsars which was made after she noticed an unusual output from a radio telescope . Bell noticed an unpredicted output on the graphical trace and followed it up, eventually discovering the existence of pulsars. The rate of serendipitous discovery in science is unclear, although it has been estimated to be high . This series is meant not only to add to the repertoire of serendipity stories, but to begin treating these tales as members of a growing archive, in which we attend to the role of chance and the unexpected in our rational pursuits of knowledge. Scientists here will share how accidents and reason intertwined in their practice, and researchers of serendipity will unpack how that happens.

Climate adaptation and resilience scholars are struggling to address distributive and procedural justice in climate resilience efforts. While the capability approach (CA) has been widely appraised as a suitable justice basis for this context, there are few detailed studies assessing this possibility. This paper addresses this gap by advancing discussions about the prospects of the CA for guiding justice work in climate resilience. With its emphasis on the final value and mutually irreducible character of the concrete beings and doings of individuals, we find the CA relevant for tackling salient aspects of adaptation, such as the multi-faceted and locally specific nature of climate vulnerability. We also present and discuss a capability application that has particular relevance for including distributive and procedural justice considerations in climate resilience. On the other hand, we find that extant arguments in support of the CA neglect the limitations of the CA and some dilemmas involved in applying it, also overestimating the differences between the CA and other justice approaches, especially those based on resources and needs. These problems lead us to advise against treating the CA as a one-size-fits-all solution to the ills of climate resilience and they further raise a need for joining efforts with complementary approaches.

That there is a “crisis of peer review” at the moment is not in dispute, but sufficient attention has not yet been paid to the normative potential that lies in current calls for reform. In contrast to approaches to “fixing” the problems in peer review, which tend to maintain the status quo in terms of professionalising opportunities, this paper addresses the needs of philosophers and how peer-review reform can be an opportunity to improve the academic discipline of philosophy, whereby progress is understood as making the discipline more fair to the global academic community and more conducive to the flourishing of academic philosophers. The paper evaluates recent categories of relevant norms and correlating reforms. In conclusion, it recommends that philosophy pursue the norms of transparency and democracy explicitly when proposing peer-review reform and suggest that proposals for forum-based models of peer review are most likely to support those norms.

The pragmatic view of urban resilience has re-framed long-lasting social issues as chronic social stresses that can be addressed by building strong social networks in urban environments. This practice, inspired by disaster management, is problematic because it presupposes a community whose members share the same fate. Conversely, social vulnerability emerges from the asymmetrical distribution of agency in the social order, so that a low social position jeopardises life chances. Hence, we argue that the social dimension in urban resilience should focus on the role of social positions and individuals’ agentic predispositions to control their life chances if faced with adversity (i.e., their Mastery). Using structural equation modelling and data from a 2018 public Dutch survey, we found that when mediated by Mastery, socioeconomic status drives the individual’s positive adaptation behaviour. In contrast, Interaction with Primary Networks, Neighbourhood Cohesion, and Membership in Voluntary Associations have an unsubstantial relationship to positive adaptation. These empirical results suggest that Mastery is crucial for people’s resilience in their daily life. In view of the recent shift towards negotiation in resilience thinking, we propose Mastery as the guiding factor for transforming arrangements that shape social positions.

Samantha Copeland takes this chapter to delve into the history of philosophy of science, paying particular attention to the discussions around scientific discovery and the assumptions made by philosophers along the way about what parts of the discovery process can and cannot be studied. Copeland suggests that serendipity research might shed light on what has been left outside of philosophical investigation. She focusses in particular on the seeming ‘leap’ that scientists must take when discoveries happen, between a state of not-knowing to a state of recognizing the scientific value of an observation or event. Most philosophical accounts tend towards internalism (that is, assuming the important steps in discovery occur only in the mind), or the focus remains on what happens after an accident or chance encounter rather than on the encounter itself. Copeland offers an alternative interpretation from the perspective of her serendipity research, on what the interaction between chance and reason can tell us about scientific discovery more generally. That is, she argues, the intersection of chance and wisdom provides philosophy with the opportunity to better understand how our minds interact with the world to produce knowledge.

The concept of serendipity or accidental discovery is typically discussed in the context of organizational research and development (RnD) through narratives involving ‘renegade iconoclasts’ laboring at the periphery. Recently, robust academic literature has emerged that grounds serendipity epistemologically. In the current work, this literature is introduced in the context of the typical activities of contemporary life science-focused RnD organizations. Practical patterns are described that can increase the likelihood of realizing accidental (serendipitous) RnD discoveries.

This article contributes to recent work on justice in resilience-based projects for climate adaptation. At present, the model commonly used for guiding normative reflection in this domain is the tripartite model of justice, whereby justice is seen as comprising distributive, procedural and recognitional aspects. After discussing some conceptual problems and practical shortcomings of this model, we propose an alternative model with six forms of justice or kinds of justice demands: distributive, procedural, intergenerational, restorative and retributive justice, and justice in system outcomes. We also illustrate some advantages of this model with respect to representative accounts of the tripartite model.

BACKGROUND: Prompted by recent shocks and stresses to health systems globally, various studies have emerged on health system resilience. Our aim is to describe how health system resilience is operationalised within empirical studies and previous reviews. We compare these to the core conceptualisations and characteristics of resilience in a broader set of domains (specifically, engineering, socio-ecological, organisational and community resilience concepts), and trace the different schools, concepts and applications of resilience across the health literature. METHODS: We searched the Pubmed database for concepts related to 'resilience' and 'health systems'. Two separate analyses were conducted for included studies: a total of n = 87 empirical studies on health system resilience were characterised according to part of health systems covered, type of threat, resilience phase, resilience paradigm, and approaches to building resilience; and a total of n = 30 reviews received full-text review and characterised according to type of review, resilience concepts identified in the review, and theoretical framework or underlying resilience conceptualisation. RESULTS: The intersection of health and resilience clearly has gained importance in the academic discourse with most papers published since 2018 in a variety of journals and in response to external threats, or in reference to more frequent hospital crisis management. Most studies focus on either resilience of health systems generally (and thereby responding to an external shock or stress), or on resilience within hospitals (and thereby to regular shocks and operations). Less attention has been given to community-based and primary care, whether formal or informal. While most publications do not make the research paradigm explicit, 'resilience engineering' is the most prominent one, followed by 'community resilience' and 'organisational resilience'. The social-ecological systems roots of resilience find the least application, confirming our findings of the limited application of the concept of transformation in the health resilience literature. CONCLUSIONS: Our review shows that the field is fragmented, especially in the use of resilience paradigms and approaches from non-health resilience domains, and the health system settings in which these are used. This fragmentation and siloed approach can be problematic given the connections within and between the complex and adaptive health systems, ranging from community actors to local, regional, or national public health organisations to secondary care. Without a comprehensive definition and framework that captures these interdependencies, operationalising, measuring and improving resilience remains challenging.

This paper begins with the paradox of teaching ethics, that we teach ethical theory in the form of general rules whereas the practice of ethics occurs in dynamic and uncertain contexts. I argue, utilizing literature that highlights the role of anticipation and relationships in ethical practice, that the goal of ethics is not consensus or agreement about what rule to follow, in a particular situation nor in general. That is, doing ethics is not about rule-making or decision-making; rather, this paper provides arguments from philosophical ethics as well as ethics education for understanding ethical practice as exploring the possible together. Drawing from these diverse perspectives, the paper contributes to discussions about the nature of ethics itself and how we should theorize about it. Finally, conclusions related to how an ethics of the possible could be taught and why it should be are offered.

An increasingly popular solution to the anti-scientific climate rising on social media platforms has been the appeal to more critical thinking from the user’s side. In this paper, we zoom in on the ideal of critical thinking and unpack it in order to see, specifically, whether it can provide enough epistemic agency so that users endowed with it can break free from enclosed communities on social media (so-called epistemic bubbles). We criticise some assumptions embedded in the ideal of critical thinking online and, instead, we propose that a better way to understand the virtuous behaviour at hand is as critical engagement, namely a mutual cultivation of critical skills among the members of an epistemic bubble.
This mutual cultivation allows members within an epistemic bubble (in contrast, as we will show, with the authority-based models of epistemic echo chambers) to become more autonomous critical thinkers by cultivating self-trust. We use the model of relational autonomy as well as resources from work on epistemic self-trust and epistemic interdependence to develop an explanatory framework, which in turn may ground rules for identifying and creating virtuous epistemic bubbles within the environments of social media platforms.

In this chapter, Samantha Copeland explores the research into the nature of sagacity in instances of serendipity—the particular kind of wisdom that allows some individuals to see the potential value in an unexpected, accidental encounter with another person, place or thing. She takes on the problem of what an “art of serendipity” could be, and uses the lenses of episteme, techne and metis to reveal what expertise, talents, perspectives and relationships should constitute the practice of such an art. In particular, a focus on metis, commonly known as “cunning wisdom”, and an exploration of recent research on integrating serendipity into practice are found to highlight the importance of standpoint, responsiveness and relational support as the key elements that practitioners of the art of serendipity seem to bring together when they generate opportunities out of chance.

This chapter explores ignorance that relates to our ability to fully understand our own role in an epistemic community, specifically in relation to the roles of others. It is an explicitly social approach to ignorance, to the ignorance that shapes our relationships with others, and constrains our ability to know, requiring us to trust. This ignorance is embodied within our relations with one another as epistemic agents; it exists in the space between. Focussing in particular on the ways we regularly extend our cognition by depending on others (or on our tools) to perform steps in our cognitive labour on our behalf, I use an account from relational autonomy theory in feminist bioethics to examine the importance of reliability and its complements, trust and self-trust in these relationships. Further, I look to how such relationships can either cultivate or hinder our epistemic agency and the agency of others, particularly in contexts where there is potential for oppression or collaboration, exploitation or intimacy.

This chapter looks closely at the use of resilience as a value in pandemic discourses, and particularly at how it reflects the moral complexity of the situation the pandemic presents: an extended crisis where shocks and stressors interact and have an uncertain end. We review key aspects of how resilience has been conceptualised, generally speaking, focusing on its normative implications. Insofar as resilience is suggested as a goal, or used to evaluate individuals, groups and systems, the rhetorical use of resilience in the pandemic has moral implications that we unpack. Asking questions such as resilience to what, of what, and for whom, drives our analysis of the multiple scales at which morally relevant factors must be considered, in terms of distance and certainty, and across space and over time. Further, we highlight the importance of particularly challenging, intersecting scales both within and beyond the pandemic, such as the interaction between other- and self-regarding concerns and the tension between transformation and conservation, as we consider when to take up opportunities for improving ourselves, our society and our systems, in times of extended crises and radical change. Given that a ‘return to normal’ is neither universally desirable nor likely, we recommend in this chapter ways to address resilience as a value that can shape approaches to policy and behaviour while also being explicit about the normative—evaluative and also prescriptive—implications of its use.

While resilience is a major concept in development, climate adaptation, and related do-mains, many doubts remain about how to interpret this term, its relationship with closely overlap-ping terms, or its normativity. One major view is that, while resilience originally was a descriptive concept denoting some adaptive property of ecosystems, subsequent applications to social contexts distorted its meaning and purpose by framing it as a transformative and normative quality. This article advances an alternative philosophical account based on the scrutiny of C.S. Holling’s original work on resilience. We show that resilience had a central role among Holling’s proposals for re-forming environmental science and management, and that Holling framed resilience as an ecosys-tem’s capacity of absorbing change and exploiting it for adapting or evolving, but also as the social ability of maintaining and opportunistically exploiting that natural capacity. Resilience therefore appears as a transformative social-ecological property that is normative in three ways: as an intrinsic ecological value, as a virtue of organizations or management styles, and as a virtuous understanding of human–nature relations. This interpretation accounts for the practical relevance of resilience, clar-ifies the relations between resilience and related terms, and is a firm ground for further normative work on resilience.

Current trends in serendipity research and collaborative ethics point to the importance of cultivating bottom-up approaches to designing for datafication in urban centers. The focus on pattern recognition in big scale data analysis, combined with an exponential growth in and infrastructural support of ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICIs), has led to concerns about whether smart cities will turn urban environments into sites that leave little space for diverse and unplanned encounters. We take the position that smart cities need to take citizen agency into account and explain how to conceive the smart city in terms of serendipitous opportunity and community engagement. We do this by elaborating on the idea of situated serendipity, and how this kind of serendipity is co-constructed by technologies, citizens, and the urban setting. We subsequently present a methodology in line with recent work with sensory ethnography, to better understand the meaning and value of serendipity in the smart city. Ultimately, we propose a new way to imagine the ‘living lab’ as a cultivator of serendipity, through techniques developed in the fields of design, innovation, improvisation, citizen science and participatory ethics.