Social and Physical Ecologies for Child Resilience: Wisdom from Asia and Africa

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Background

Since Emmy Werner and her team discovered on the Hawaiian island of Kauai the “invincible” children who fared well despite exposure to significant household risks, there has been proliferating research on child resilience as a positive response to adverse conditions. The past five decades have seen significant advancements in, and diverse approaches to understanding challenges, facilitative factors, and positive outcomes in the resilience process that involve children. Despite existing and continuously emerging modelings and framings, there appears a common understanding that child resilience unfolds through the interactions between individuals and the environments surrounding them. This Research Topic, therefore, takes an ecological approach to child resilience. While ecologies constitute social spaces that nurture child resilience, they can also refer to the “physical” environments surrounding children. There has been robust empirical evidence suggesting resilience is a shared capacity of the individual and the social ecology (e.g., families, schools, and communities), and more recently of the individual and the physical ecology (e.g., the built or natural environment).

While child resilience is culture and context-specific, much literature in this regard has emerged from the western contexts. It has long been argued that western-based research may have limited applications for resilience policy and practice in majority world contexts, like Asia and Africa, which are home to a predominant proportion of the world’s child populations. Yet current resilience work has inadequately drawn on the wisdom of Asian and African children as well as the dynamics within and across their families, schools, communities, and built environments. This Special Issue aims to challenge, complement, and complicate current knowledge and practice of child resilience by considering a range of ecological factors in Asian and African contexts.

The Research Topic will take a deep dive into the social and physical ecologies that undergird the resilience process of Asian and African children. We invite submissions that qualitatively and/or quantitatively prod and probe resilience factors embedded in Asian and African children’s social and physical ecologies, such as the sociocultural dynamics of family, school, and community, as well as the resources and facilities of the built/natural environment. In recognition of the interdependence across social and physical ecologies, we particularly welcome empirical papers that take a multi-systemic, coordinated approach to child resilience in Asia and Africa. Fusing the scholarship of the collected papers, the Research Topic intends to present various challenges Asian and African children may face; diverse, responsive strategies of resilience to these challenges; and multiple positive outcomes despite such challenges. While efforts to promote child resilience should be tailored to the unique context/s to which sub-populations of young people are exposed (differently), we anticipate that knowledge built and lessons learned from the Research Topic can have implications beyond the Asian and African settings.



We welcome submissions of topics including but not limited to:

- How is child resilience understood in Asian or African contexts?

- What are the resilience factors and how do the resilience processes unfold in the social and/or physical ecologies surrounding Asian or African children?

- How do the situational and/or cultural dynamics complicate child resilience in Africa or Asia?

- What are the potential synergies and/or trade-offs between social and physical ecologies that support child resilience in Africa or Asia?

Keywords: : Child Resilience, Multisystemic Resilience, Physical Ecologies, Social Ecologies, Asia, Africa

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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