Framing Resilience through a multidisciplinary approach: reference, agency and metaphor in sustainability discourse

This project investigates how the concept of resilience is used and understood in Canadian sustainability discourse, especially in policy documents and public reports written in English and French. Resilience is a key term in climate and sustainability discussions, but its meaning often difficult to grasp; resilience can be used as a property of communities, governments, systems, or individuals and often remaining vague and abstract. Such indeterminacy can lead to confusion or miscommunication, especially when responsibility for resilience is unclear. This project will analyze how resilience is introduced, maintained, and framed by focusing on (i) reference, (ii) metaphoric and other non-literal imagery associated to resilience and (iii) explicit and implicit indicators of agency and responsibility. A bilingual corpus of Canadian and UN documents will be built and annotated using specialized tools to track how resilience is expressed and who is portrayed as responsible. The project will benefit participating institutions by roviding new insights into how sustainability messages are shaped through language, helping improve communication strategies and policy development. Ultimately, the findings will help clarify how resilience is framed in public discourse and support more inclusive and accountable approaches to sustainability and climate governance.

Faculty Supervisor:

Lise Fontaine

Student:

Partner:

University Salzburg

Discipline:

Sociology

Sector:

Sustainability & the Environment

University:

Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

Program: