IHPST Research Seminar | Second Session Fall 2025

You are cordially invited to attend the Fall 2025 Research Seminar Series of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, organized by Professor Mark Solovey

Michael Pettit (Department of Psychology, York University) will present:

What Counts as Resilience? Childhood Adversity, Psychiatric Epidemiology, and the Coloniality of the “Invulnerable”

In-person Event

In 1972, psychologist Jerome Kagan boldly proclaimed research he had recently conducted on the Maya of Guatemala would overturn the most cherished assumption in his field of child development. He insisted early deprivation did not doom a child to a lifetime of debility. These children, even without recourse to expert intervention, proved remarkably “resilient” against life’s many hardships. Despite his priority in using the term, Kagan’s Guatemala study rarely appeared in reviews of resilience as the concept entered the psychological mainstream in the twenty-first century. Now ubiquitous in psychological science, community activism, and humanitarian policy, the nature of resilience’s “ordinary magic” has proved elusive. It at once refers to individual psyches and material infrastructures, empowerment and damage, local strengths and geopolitical priorities. The absence of Kagan’s study in these narratives illuminates what does and does not count as psychological resilience. I identify three historical prerequisites for the emergence of contemporary resilience theory. The first is the “discovery” after World War II of how early “deprivation” led to lifelong psychic damage and the mobilization of this knowledge in critiques of the welfare state. The second precursor was the rise of psychiatric epidemiology as a way of knowing where the actuarial risk factor became ontologically real. A final prerequisite was the coloniality of being in an Anglophone field’s fascination with often literal island communities for natural experiments among the poor. This genealogy illuminates the historical expansion of psychological damage from trauma resulting from a discrete, extraordinary event to Adverse Childhood Experiences combining and accreting in the body. It shows how resilience functions as both a critique and an intensification of therapeutic culture.

Format: short presentation by author followed by extended discussion of pre-circulated paper 

Pre-circulated paper: This paper will be available 7 days before the event, on Oct. 15th. To request a copy, please contact Adriana Leviston at adriana.leviston@utoronto.ca

Michael Pettit - Academic Profile York University 

New Book – Governed by Affect: Hot Cognition and the End of Cold War Psychology

Series Editor: New Histories of Psychology

October 22, 2025 from 3:45 to 5:15 | Victoria College 91 Charles Street West, Room VC303 (IHPST Lounge)