Building Resilience in the Sciences: Associations Between Care and Resilience Amongst Scientists In Professional Societies

Keywords: Resilience, Care, Sciences, Professional Societies
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Increasingly, scholarship from multiple disciplines is highlighting difficulties with mental health, precarity, and resilience amongst scientists across the academic landscape. Simultaneously, calls have been made to intensify our focus on developing practices and networks which promote caring relations and support between scientists to withstand challenges in our work, institutions, and disciplines. In this study we engage survey data on personal sense of care and resilience expressed by members of three ornithological societies (n = 1178), finding a positive association between care and resilience capacities (Absorptive, Adaptive, Restorative, and Transformative, taken from Lerback et al 2022). These findings highlight the importance of recognizing, fostering, and supporting networks of caring relations within professional settings and academic institutions in order to better support scientists through creating contexts in which they can thrive in their field. Ultimately, we suggest these societies and institutions recognize and support policies, programs, actions, and groups which provision care to their members as a means of increasing resilience within members’ disciplines.