Resilience and Forced Healing: The Therapisation of Social Care in an Australian Workfare Programme

There is increasing research and policy interest in how the ‘resilience’ of marginalised communities can be supported through Australia's social care systems. Drawing on a critical examination of Australian parliamentary inquiry submissions, reports and other materials ( N = 127) related to a pre-employment programme that historically targeted marginalised single-parent families, ParentsNext, this article demonstrates that there is a growing need to be sensitised to and critically engage with resilience and associated discourses. The article contends that through these discourses, the therapisation of social care for marginalised communities can occur, reimposing state-coordinated controls and (self-)responsibility concordant with settler-colonial and neoliberal imaginaries of care and distress. Through its empirical findings and theoretical interventions, the article locates avenues for critically rethinking resilience and its impacts on understanding social care and social suffering.