Crisis in Motion

Abstract

This article diagnoses the catastrophe of the present as crisis in motion. Looking to the sphere of circulation as site and source of a multitude of crises in contemporary life, it explores the emergence of crisis not simply in the disruption of movement but in the production of particular regimes of motion. The article tells three stories of crises in motion: supply chain disruption during COVID-19, blockades of colonial circulatory infrastructures, and the disastrous ecologies of extractivism, emphasizing their deep entanglements. This article traces how these crises of lifeworlds are produced by particular configurations of motion that are assembled through imperial infrastructures. Each tale is a fragment of a wider story about the violent motion of expanded reproduction, and between them are common places and peoples in struggle with the entangled crises of premature death, dispossession, and ecological collapse. Yet, in each case, crisis is called to order through refusal. Refusal disrupts racial capitalist and settler colonial circulation as it also opens radical alternatives. Looking to struggles over the imperial logistics of mobility and containment, the paper asks what kinds of collective futures take shape through infrastructure's refusal and repair.