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As resilience has become an increasingly influential governance principle, geographers have been among the most ardent critics of the concept and its depoliticizing effects. But what might the last decade of geographic critiques of resilience tell us about the geographic thought today? Situating geographic research on resilience in the discipline’s reparative conjuncture and the problematic of the Anthropocene, this paper draws attention to what I call salvage geographies. Playing on James Clifford's (1986), sense of salvage ethnographies, salvage geographies refer to practices of geographic knowledge production that are organized around desires to secure the promise of modernist futurity in the Anthropocene. Analyzing the affective landscapes shaping critical geographic resilience research, I identity two forms of salvage geographies: first, solutions-oriented approaches prevalent in critical sustainability studies strive to salvage modernity’s promise for science to secure a future of limitless, progressive growth and development; second, radical approaches prevalent in political ecology and security studies often strive to salvage the promise of modernist critique to politicize knowledge. These salvage geographies can only be sustained through the instrumentalization of difference, which defutures or consumes the potential for other forms of geographic thought. Turning to feminist, decolonial, and abolitionist research, I highlight the potential for reparative disciplinary futures that orient geography towards problem-finding rather than problem-solving activities. 

In this article, we seek to open up for critical debate disciplinary narratives that center the “synthesis” qualities of geographic thought. Proponents of Geography often emphasize its integrative, synthesis approach to human–environment relations to underline its value to interdisciplinary research initiatives addressing critical real-world issues such as climate change. But there are multiple styles of knowledge synthesis at work within academia and beyond, and they have contradictory ethical and epistemological effects. More specifically, synthesis is on the rise, but it is not Geography’s synthesis-as-understanding. Rather, an increasingly dominant cybernetic sociotechnical imaginary is installing a specific notion of synthesis—“synthesis-as-solution”—into universities, transforming both the production of knowledge and the institutional management and technological manifestation of that production. This cybernetic sociotechnical imaginary constrains research ethically and epistemologically to reduce knowledge to the synthesizable information flows and continuous innovation that characterize cybernetic control. In this context, non-conforming research—that is, research that disrupts or disdains such smooth synthesis—risks being labeled unprofessional, unimportant, and obsolescent and marginalized institutionally. Geographic disciplinary narratives that unreflexively celebrate synthesis thus risk producing a paradoxical future for Geography, one in which more space for different modes of knowledge production is created, but the type of difference recognized and affirmed is severely constrained. There is a pressing need for geographers to pay more attention to the practices and contexts in which we create disciplinary narratives because, like the content of our knowledge production, they can either challenge or reinforce a cybernetic sociotechnical imaginary. 

In April of 2019, the Rockefeller Foundation's ‘100 Resilient Cities’ (100RC) programme abruptly shuttered, surprising programme proponents and critics alike. In this paper, we explore why this happened, why some styles of geographic critique could not anticipate 100RC’s closure, and what this inability means for dominant strands of critical geographic analysis. To answer these questions, we bring literature on the biopolitics of resilience, technopolitics and Black geographies to bear on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning. We argue that answers to these questions revolve around the designerly roots of resilience thinking, whose distinct intellectual lineage conventional critical approaches have struggled to pick up on. We show how, on the one hand, design practices of synthesis in Greater Miami attempted to frame and instrumentalise Black histories of and experiences with racial and environmental violence as bounded knowledge that could improve the functioning of complex systems. On the other hand, synthesis created overflowings: opaque knowledges and experiences that resist the framing process and continue to mediate political battles over what resilience in Greater Miami practically becomes. Based on the case, we propose that an inductive style of critique that traces processes of framing and overflowing can help advance critical geographic analysis. As we illustrate in the paper, this mode of critique pays specific attention to the opaque, historically and contextually specific knowledges and experiences that refuse to be framed or synthesised, and work to counter-frame dominant conceptions of resilience—critical and conventional alike. 

In this article we critique resilience’s oft-celebrated overcoming of modern liberal frameworks. We bring work on resilience in geography and cognate fields into conversation with explorations of the ‘asymmetrical Anthropocene’, an emerging body of thought which emphasizes human-nonhuman relational asymmetry. Despite their resonances, there has been little engagement between these two responses to the human/world binary. This is important for changing the terms of the policy debate: engaging resilience through the asymmetrical Anthropocene framing shines a different light upon policy discourses of adaptive management, locating resilience as a continuation of modernity’s anthropocentric will-to-govern. From this vantage point, resilience is problematic, neglecting the powers of nonhuman worlds that are not accessible or appropriable for governmental use. However, this is not necessarily grounds for pessimism. To conclude, we argue that human political agency is even more vital in an indeterminate world.