On 7 June 2022 postgraduates (PGRs) and early career researchers (ECRs) with an interest in youth studies met for a virtual event, facilitated by the youth study groups of three UK organisations: the British Educational Research Association (BERA), the British Sociological Association (BSA) and the Political Studies Association (PSA).
During a time of ‘intersecting crises’ (see Moore et al., 2021), we decided to focus on adaptability and resilience as useful concepts to deal with these challenges.
Adaptability can be defined as the ‘capacity to adaptively regulate cognition, emotion, and behaviour in response to new, changing, and/or challenging conditions and circumstances’ (Martin, 2012, p. 90), while resilience can be defined as the ‘process of achieving positive outcome despite challenge and constraint’ (Yin & Mu, 2022, p. 2).
Although resilience is a contested concept in the literature (see for example Yin & Mu, 2022) and should not be used to deflect attention away from structural inequalities, the speakers in this event often found themselves having to develop resilience to complete their projects. The two-hour session was split into two parts, summarised as follows, which included breakout room sessions where participants could reflect on what they have learned from the short presentations and roundtable discussions.
