Dr. Melissa Morgan of UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School recently published the book, Critical Resilience and Thriving in Response to Systemic Oppression: Insights to Inform Social Justice in Critical Times (Routledge 2023).
Critical Resilience and Thriving in Response to Systemic Oppression offers new insight into individuals’ resourceful use of resilience while dealing with structural and social injustice. Drawing on qualitative research methods which foreground the voices of Holocaust survivors and Latinx in/migrants to the United States, Dr. Morgan’s book highlights the roles of cultural values, spirituality, and perseverance against severe institutionalized oppression. From these findings, Dr. Morgan applies feminist and critical perspectives to expand present conceptualizations of resilience. She posits critical resilience emerges in response to social inequities and offers a nuanced perspective on thriving and other responses to these ongoing hardships.
Dr. Melissa Morgan is a Professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology and affiliated with the departments of Chicana/o Studies and Latin American and Iberian Studies. She previously served as the Vice Chair of UC Santa Barbara’s Academic Senate and its Committee on Diversity and Equity. Her research focuses on resilience and thriving in relation to multicultural, international, and in/migrant variables, with an emphasis on the experiences of Latina/o populations. All of her work is based in a social justice epistemology, employing mixed methodology and community-based research paradigms to the goal of tangibly addressing concerns for the populations she works with.
Her book is available for purchase online.
