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Summary The concept of resilience has become an established, taken-for-granted concept in social work. This poststructuralist discourse analysis of randomly sampled social work articles on resilience examines the discursive mechanisms through which the concept of resilience has been constructed in particular ways and considers the political effects of such usage. Findings The study of resilience is always a post facto analysis; markers of resilience are predetermined by dominant ideas of the normal and the normative subject. Systemic risk factors such as poverty and inequality are acknowledged to be productive of subjects in need of resilience. Yet, those structures are relegated to the margins of the manuscript and elided in favor of individualized analysis and intervention; the identified locus of risk and the targeted site of interventions are entirely at odds. Resilience, thus, serves as a designation for risky subjects’ capacity to accommodate—not actively change—their social/political environments, including their interactions with social work and social workers. It functions as a technology of the neoliberal self that allows social workers to construct and manage subjects capable of self-management and productive self-sufficiency. Application The resilience enterprise thus short-circuits social work’s aims for social justice. Examination of the discourse of resilience for their implications for practice, education, and research is a political imperative for social work and is necessary to open up new sightlines of possibility for a reenergized, more complex social work praxis. Suggestions for future directions are included.

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This article offers an analysis of a business mentorship event in Fredericton, NB, which targeted immigrants sponsored through the New Brunswick Provincial Nominee Program (NBPNP)—an economic revitalization program designed to attract foreign business people and skilled workers to settle in the province. Applying Derrida’s concept of hospitality as a technology of whiteness, we examine the stated and implicitly understood expectations for the NBPNP, including the mechanisms at play for regulating newcomer’s behavior and comportment. We locate our analysis in the context of a regionally expressed Canadian multiculturalism, extending the relevance of our findings beyond Fredericton to Atlantic Canada. We ask: how do associated discourses of whiteness, multiculturalism and hospitality come into play to shape dynamics of power existing between hosts (settlement workers, various shadow state actors and mentor volunteers) and racialized newcomer guests? As a racialized threshold event, the Sip, Greet and Meet facilitated an exchange of hospitality such that the New Brunswick native hosts marked newcomers as perpetual arrivants, while holding the immigrants responsible for the success of their settlement in the Fredericton region. We show how the discourses regarding newcomers’ duties cleared nativist inhabitants of any accountability for the success of immigrant settlement. We also show how the process of welcoming conveyed a message that the future success of the local community, the province and even Atlantic Canada depended on the business class immigrants’ ability to serve as dutiful and grateful guests.

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