How Do Social Contexts, Cultural Ideologies, and Cultural Tools Impact Youth Resilience?

The next seminar is on ‘'How Do Social Contexts, Cultural Ideologies, and Cultural Tools Impact Youth Resilience?'.

The session will be chaired by Professor Essi Viding. 

The speaker is Dr Joseph Calabrese, UCL Anthropology, who will be followed by a response from a young person, Lizzie Mitchell.

Dr Joseph Calabrese abstract: Which sorts of social contexts actually foster the development of youth resilience?  Those in which all challenges have been removed?  Or those which present challenges that must be overcome and learned from?  How do specific cultural tools and ideologies foster or inhibit resilience?  In this talk, Joseph Calabrese, an anthropologist/clinical psychologist, will explore these questions, beginning with a discussion of the Native American Sweat Lodge ritual (a cultural tool which induces discomfort to enhance resilience) and moving to an analysis of the prominent ideology of ‘safetyism’, in which any challenge to one’s opinions, or even mere disagreement, are alleged to be  ‘violence’.  Important questions to consider will include: What is the role of challenge in the university?  How do we prepare young people for this engagement with challenge?  What effects on resilience (and education) can we expect from the new ideology of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and monitoring for micro-aggressions?  What effects have social media and the ideological wars it facilitates had on youth identity and mental health?

The UCL Catalyst seminar series is intended to spark fresh thinking and debate, featuring cutting-edge UCL research relevant for children and young people’s mental health and facilitating new connections between scientists working in different disciplines.