The Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group (CIRG) | Department of Social Anthropology

The Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group (CIRG) is a Cambridge-based interdisciplinary research network. It was established in 2019 by Alexander Taylor, formerly of the Department of Social Anthropology, and Henri van Soest, formerly with the Department of Land Economy, with funding from the Centre for the study of Existential Risk (CSER) and the Energy@Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research Centre.

The CIRG aims to connect researchers from across disciplines whose work touches on themes of societal and infrastructure resilience. The CIRG currently consists of over of 50 members from a diversity of disciplines, different career stages and backgrounds. The current strategic aims of the Group are as follows:

To understand and scope the research on infrastructure and societal resilience being undertaken at the University of Cambridge.
To uncover and strengthen links between different research projects across the six schools of the University and build a community of researchers working on resilience.
To provide members of the network with a platform for sharing knowledge, methods and experience across disciplines.
To bring the latest research on resilience into dialogue with policymakers, industry leaders and members of the resilience community.
To help improve understandings of resilience by situating resilience theories in historical context and by critically analysing, unpacking and problematising the concept of resilience as it appears across academic disciplines and proliferating policy and industry domains (e.g. as a property of complex adaptive systems; as a situated cultural practice; as a political discourse or neoliberal form of governmentality).
To develop interdisciplinary, international and cross-sector collaborative research projects with a focus on infrastructure and societal resilience.
To conduct theoretical and empirical investigations of the scientific, policy and industry use of resilience (understanding what resilience means in different disciplines and across different industry and policy contexts is essential for undertaking integrated research).

Since 2019 the Research Group has arranged a number of events in Cambridge and we will be organising a range of events in the future. If you would like to keep up to date with the Group’s activities please send an email to Alexander Taylor (aret2@cantab.ac.uk) and Henri van Soest (hv271@cam.ac.uk). You can also follow the CIRG via Twitter here: @_CIRG

Awarding Grant Body:

The Cambridge Infrastructure Resilience Group was established in 2019 by Alexander Taylor (Department of Social Anthropology) and Henri van Soest (Department of Land Economy) with funding from the Centre for the study of Existential Risk (CSER) and the ‘In Search of “Good” Energy Policy Small Grants Scheme’ run by the Energy@Cambridge Interdisciplinary Research Centre.