Thinking with Hartmut Rosa in green social work: an invitation to resonance theory

This article argues that recent advances in critical theory, particularly the resonance concept developed by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, offer a philosophical framework of relevance for the emerging field of green social work. Even though Rosa’s scholarship remains undiscovered in this context, his conception of the good life as built on resonant relationships offers insights I discuss throughout the article in relation to (1) diagnosis, (2) implications for practice and (3) institutional reform. Specifically, Rosa’s work offers a promising lens to examine social and psychological pathology in modern societies, pointing towards the need to remedy disengaged modes of existence marked by a loss of relations of intrinsic value and meaning. As such, the concepts of alienation, acceleration and autoaggression provide a critical framework for understanding the wider contexts that frame subjects’ life strategies under neoliberal capitalism, characterised by dysfunctional, disconnected ways of relating to the world and intensifying damage to the biosphere.