The current pandemic provides an opportunity to rethink societal resilience. Work on resilience typically focuses on structural and systemic vulnerabilities, such as in critical national infrastructure, or supply chains. COVID19 reveals the additional importance of emotional resilience at the collective societal level.

Emotions offer a human-centric approach that directly addresses how people feel within society. This is an area I am keen to expand and my research focuses not only on the emotional toll and trauma that accompanies a crisis, but also places emphasis on the importance of fostering public trust, offering hope, and cultivating cohesion and compassion in order for society to adapt and rebuild.  

Although current attention is rightly on the nation’s health and the state of the economy, the emotional long-term state of society, and the tenor or the public mood, are critical to the UK’s ability to withstand and adapt to the pandemic. 

In 2020 I contributed to policy discussions on these themes, including a report by the School of International Futures, which you can read here.