Resilience is a relational concept and process. It cannot be a replacement for inclusive and equitable change. For emerging library professionals, expectations around resilience can present unique challenges, frustrations, and hopes. Often these expectations are not equally felt and to understand professional and career resilience we need to look beyond our own experiences and ask where change can be made. The need for resilience offers an opportunity to do things differently as a profession.

Local and global challenges, such as the pandemic and climate change, see libraries furthering the concept of resilience, building sustainable and adaptable services that focus on communities. Individualised understandings of resilience, however, risk obscuring the need for meaningful change. Understanding resilience as relational provides opportunities to acknowledge equity and diversity as fundamental for transformative change. It sees differences embraced and the building of mutual empathy and trust across library services, careers, and leadership.

This session challenges our understanding of resilience in libraries and questions what resilience might obscure. Drawing on research from library, queer, and disability justice spaces, it reflects on approaches to doing things differently as a profession that can drive change with care and connection.