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Abstract
Traditionally, the field of resilience research, especially as it relates to children and youth, has been well ensconced in the discipline of psychology. Sociologists, when they do engage with the concept, tend to do so at the level of the community. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have called for a construction of resilience and resilience-promoting interventions that recognizes the importance of context and culture for the positive development of youth living in stressful circumstances. As such, the social ecologies surrounding a youth and the responsiveness of interventions within these ecologies are argued to be as important, if not more so, than the risk and protective factors characterizing the individual. This shift in gaze from the individual to systemic structures creates important challenges for practitioners such as school psychologists and opens up an interesting discursive space for sociologists to participate in the exploration and explication of what the concept of resilience is all about. In this article I explore how a sociological perspective can enrich the discourse and how the activation of the sociological imagination can serve to expand the boundaries of resilience research and school psychology practice.
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