News and events
Bouverie Connect
2025 editions
- June - Bouverie Connect | June 2025
- May - Transforming Families: Research insights you need to know
- April - Knowledge, Partnerships and Research in action
- January - New Year, New Opportunities at the Bouverie Centre
Archive editions
For access to specific editions published pre 2025, please email bouverie.marketing@latrobe.edu.au with the name of the edition or article you are looking for and we will respond as soon as possible.
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Register for our upcoming events.
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Building Team Resilience
Monday 25 August 09:30am
Learn how to build, manage and support resilient teams and promote positive team cultures. -
2026 Information Session: Postgraduate in Family Therapy
Tuesday 09 September 06:00pm
Study Family Therapy in 2026 with the Bouverie Centre, La Trobe University
Read the latest news from our Centre.
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From the Shadows into the Light
Introducing a new eBook authored by Connie Paglaniti, a member of our Family Advisory Network.
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A workshop about ‘becoming unstuck’ through effective use of self.
A teaching and practice framework for understanding “stuckness” and enabling movement in complex cases.
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Feminist Father’s Bursary scholarship announcement
Supporting family violence lived experience research.
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The Bouverie Centre and AAFT: Platinum Partnership
AAFT Conference: Platinum Partnership Annoucement
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Flipping the script: Transgenerational healing with infant-led family therapy
Transgenerational healing conference presentation launches MERTIL for My Family
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Knowledge into action: Congratulations 2024 graduates
Simultaneous with launching into the 2025 academic year, we congratulate our 2024 students, who now embark on the next chapter of their careers following the successful completion of their respective postgraduate studies
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Train to sustain: Helping national partners to implement SSFC
Our partnership with Tasmanian Department of Health in implementing family-inclusive practices by expanding clinicians' skills in working with families.
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Supporting future families: Medibank research partnerships
Supporting future families: Medibank Research Partnership with the Bouverie Centre, La Trobe University
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Walk-In Together: Fostering Accessible & Inclusive Mental Health Care for Families in Distress
The Bouverie Centre's rapid and accessible Walk-in Together model is a new way forward for family inclusion in mental health care.
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Learning for a lifetime
Looking back at the incredible career of social worker, psychologist and family therapist Banu Moloney, whose teaching and mentorship informed the careers of a generation of family therapist practitioners.
Being cautious when you hear the word resilience or……Pulling a fast one
By Mark Furlong.
Certain words have a powerful up-beat vibe. The word community has this cachet. Like others with a bright symbolism, this term can be used to affirm and inspire, but it can also be said with a manipulative effect. For example, commentators can invoke the ideal of community as a ‘spray on solution’ to problems that are deep and complex (Bryson and Mowbray, 1981). Right now, an often heard word is ‘resilience.’ Similar to community, might this term also warrant sceptical attention?
We are repeatedly being told: Hang-in there. In the long run everything will be fine if you remain resilient. Be tough. Bounce back. Do not let yourself be discouraged. Public health and pop psychology spokespersons reiterate this trope. Stories of recovery and rehabilitation, of disaster survival and sporting success, reiterate the same message. In all these accounts resilience is put forward as the punchline, as the motherlode.
The terms might have changed, but there is something familiar in this account. In Victorian era England the notion of ‘character’ held a particularly positive charge. Associated with heroes and aristocrats, with explorers and the high office-bearers of empire, this quality was popularized in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem If. An evocative ode to the man of character – yes, the image of the brave and indomitable was highly gendered – the poem taught a moral lesson: you are someone of character ‘If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs’s.’ In this male-stream valorisation of detachment, readers are instructed to perform to a mythic, impossible standard.
There is a shadow side to this narrative. In the event you or I fall over, well, each of us has been shown-up as someone who does not measure up. In not making it, everyone can see we do not have what it takes. This outcome does not mean one is judged to be physically inadequate. Rather, the lack of character / resilience points to a moral failure. One has failed to be responsible. Like blaming the cabin boys for the sinking of the titanic, in this account culpability has been delegated to the lowest level entity.
Re-locating culpability from a fault in the system to the moral failure of individuals is to pull a fast one. Such a sleight of hand, such a grand example of legerdemain, adds an unfair burden onto those who are trying to manage problems that are contextual in their origins, operations and consequences. Such problems – inequality, housing precarity, climate change – are not resolvable if the individual is resilient.
A campaign to have individuals feel they have a moral duty to be unsinkable can be seen as part of a larger platform. Critics claim this campaign aims to govern subjectivity and construct a certain consciousness – a mindset that self-blames rather than is mindful of the bigger picture (Rose and Lentos, 2017). There is also a simpler, and perhaps more radical, criticism. Soraya Chemaly argues in The Resilience Myth (2024) that the valorisation of grit and determination as inherently private attributes not only misses the point, this idea is a misleading and dangerous fallacy.
That all one needs to do is‘be resilient in these tough times’ invites, nay commands, the individual to aspire to be a military entity – a being who is fortified and emotionally cauterized. More, eulogizing resilience as a private attribute furthers a regressive ideal – that one should be self-reliant, an independent being who has no need for others. Rather than seek private solutions based on the false god of autonomy, at Bouverie the commitment is to practices that build local solidarity and the quality of inter-dependence. Bruce Daisley, the ex-Twitter VP, said it well.
True resilience lies in a feeling of togetherness, that we’re united with those around us in a shared endeavour.
At the very least, let’s be cautious when resilience is cited as a wellspring value that promises stand-alone survival. Aligned with the Bouverie Centre’s reason d’etre, I suggest we instead look to the relational spaces that create resilient outcomes and take up our part of those collective spaces.
References
Bryson, L. and Mowbray, M., 1981. ‘Community’: The Spray‐on Solution. Australian journal of social issues,16(4), pp.255-267.
Chemaly, S., 2024. The Resilience Myth: New Thinking on Grit, Strength, and Growth After Trauma. Simon and Schuster.
Rose, N. and Lentzos, F., 2017. Making us resilient: Responsible citizens for uncertain times. In: Trnka, S. and Trundle,C. eds., 2017. Competing responsibilities: the ethics and politics of contemporary life. Duke University Press, pp.27-48.