TMER Revisited (with Dr. Lauren Catteneo, Shane Story, and Danielle Black)
Within marginalized communities, the need for resilience is long-term, punctuated by events that highlight long-standing rather than new marginalization. Adversity in this context is a persistent set of ecological circumstances that is resistant to change and demands ongoing engagement in resilience processes. Individuals and communities facing such adversity respond not only through the adapting and coping potentiated by resilience, but through empowering processes that change the circumstances giving rise to the need for resilience. The processes of resilience are intertwined with processes of empowerment over the long haul of fighting for change; any ecologically-valid, strengths-based work within marginalized communities must capture this interplay.
The Transconceptual Model of Empowerment and Resilience (TMER) promotes a rigorous articulation and study of the interconnection between these processes. TMER is grounded in community psychology’s strengths-based approaches at the intersection of person-in-environment. TMER distinguishes resilience’s focus on internal processes that resist, withstand, or adapt to the status quo, from empowerment’s external shifts in power, producing “status quake” change. Both processes rely upon a common set of resources. Through TMER, one can trace the iterative manner in which individuals and communities move between resilience and empowerment over time as circumstances, impact, scale, chronicity, and opportunities shift.
TMER has been cited and applied theoretically and empirically to a range of ecological settings, revealing an intriguing, underdeveloped aspect of the model – the middle ground or crossroads between resilience and empowerment to which individuals and communities return repeatedly as they face ongoing adversity. This crossroads is a figurative and literal space inhabited intermittently as people examine adverse conditions; identify and assemble resources; set internal and/or external change goals; enact these goals and reflect on the results; and consider their safety and ability to maintain these goals and actions. At this dynamic location, chronology, history, politics, risk, resources, access, and intention come together and actions are planned, enacted, recovered from, and evaluated. Understanding this junction of resilience and empowerment is critical for anyone aiming to change conditions and outcomes within communities at ongoing risk.
By revisiting TMER, we explore this middle ground through theory and data, theoretically and practically enhancing TMER at the crossroads of resilience and empowerment. The result will aid researchers, interventionists, and community members working to uncover and support resilience, empowerment, and the shift between them for individuals and communities striving to face and change the conditions of ongoing adversity.
- Resilience, Empowerment, and the Immigration Journey (with Danielle Black, Jenny Zhao, and Dennis Carter-Deen)
Resilience and empowerment are crucial to the entire immigrant experience, from a journey through settlement to ultimate comfort and belonging in their new home. Many studies have focused on resilience and empowerment in just one part of that experience. Others have looked at resilience or empowerment as crucial to the immigrant experience, but not both. We have the honor to use StoryCorps Archives, applying the TMER1 to a rich set of unstructured interviews between Afghan women immigrants and their friends and family as we learn from their experiences of empowering and resilience processes across their immigration journey.