In her inspiring talk ‘Social networks and the resilience of marginalized communities,’ dr. Miranda Lubbers discussed the role of social networks in changing unequal power relationships in today’s society.

In her talk on 22 February 2023 aan de University of Groningen she reflected on reactive and proactive capacities as reactions to crisis situations. Lubbers is Associate Professor in Anthropology Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

✅ Dr. Lubbers demonstrated how transformative capacities can change the deeper causes of such unequal power relations by addressing structural, symbolic and normalized violence.

✅She argued that social resilience can be a decisive factor in the process of transformation, but can also have harmful effects when survival strategies are used that reproduce rather than overcome inequalities in social relationships.

✅Transformative capacities appear to be most effective when they arise from social movements that are led by marginilized people and have a bottom-up structure. Such movements build upon social networks and dr. Lubbers explained that her research agenda considers these networks by 1) looking at unequal relationships; 2) studying intersectionality in networks; 3) examining networks in context and 4) analysing networks and proactive capacities.

✅Dr. Lubbers talk was followed by a lively exchange of ideas with the audience.