ABOUT THIS BOOK

Resilience is more than survival—Wendy Sims-Schouten amplifies the resistant and transformative voices of marginalized and displaced children across history.

Revisiting Childhood Resilience Through Marginalised and Displaced Voices resists the way we think about resilience, shifting the focus from personal perseverance to the lived realities of children and young people pushed to society’s margins. Wendy Sims-Schouten moves beyond the familiar idea of resilience as individual grit, instead exploring how defiance and even compliance emerge as survival strategies for care leavers, bullied youth, ethnic minorities, and those with histories of migration and displacement.

Spanning one hundred and fifty years of personal and collective histories, this book brings together interdisciplinary research co-produced with those too often left out of resilience studies. By centering their voices, it unveils how resilience is shaped not just by inner strength, but by systemic barriers and the availability of support. Revisiting Childhood Resilience calls on policymakers and practitioners to rethink resilience as something far more complex than an individual trait; a process deeply rooted in context and agency.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Wendy Sims-Schouten is professor of interdisciplinary psychology and director of arts and sciences at UCL.

REVIEWS

"This thought-provoking book revisits the concept of resilience through close interpretation of the moving stories told by marginalised children and adults across time, shining new light on the rebellious, resistant ones, so often dismissed as ‘dangerous’ or ‘deviant’. A must-read!"

— Helen Cowie, University of Surrey

"Listening to the stories of marginalised people empowers their voices and gives a very rich, multifaceted and critically innovative perspective which can reshape how we understand oppression and exclusion. Especially, this liberating book shows how conventional discussions of individual resilience can obscure the social and cultural processes we need to understand."

— Helen Haste, University of Bath

"Adopting an intriguing and eclectic perspective of resilience in understudied samples, this is a rare book that challenges the status quo. A must read for anyone seeking to gain unique insight into the concept of resilience."

— Nora Wiium, University of Bergen

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of figures and boxes
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: counter-voices of resilience
2 Waifs, strays and care-experienced young people: compliance, defiance and morality
3 Eclectic resilience: child migration through children’s eyes
4 Bullying and resilience within a neoliberal framework
5 Resilience in light of discrimination, stigmas and othering
6 Resisting internalised failure and deficiency: (specific) learning difficulties and differences in children and young people
7 Intergenerational/transgenerational trauma, lived experiences and resilience
8 Eclectic resilience: tell me your story!

References
Index