Chronic Crisis Research Articles

Chronicity, Women’s Suffering, and Prayer: a Budding Prayer Group’s Response to Chronic Developmental Crises in Zimbabwe

Abstract This paper uses textual analysis of an audio note that circulated on WhatsApp in 2018 presenting the founder of a rapidly growing predominantly women-only Zimbabwean prayer group. The audio note’s content is taken as an emergent ethnography exposing emic views of women’s lived realities. The analysis uses notions of ‘chronicity’, (Vigh 2008, 10–15) and ‘women’s suffering’ (Cole 2012, 384–6) to ground the audio note’s content in Zimbabwe’s prolonged socioeconomic and political crises. Chronic crises produce unique social actions (Vigh 2008), such as popular religious practices and theologies (Miller-McLemore 2018). The group prefers do-it-yourself (DIY) prayers which demand constant environmental and self-assessment, and comparing with peers. The group’s construction of women’s suffering as anathema to ideal Pentecostal personhoods discussed in four themes discernible from the audio note is revealing (Harnisch 2000). Techniques of DIY prayers echo the feminist notion that ‘the personal is political’. Thus, the group potentially contributes to gender transformation.

Precarious Youth and Everyday Improvisation in Kinshasa

In Kinshasa, chronic crises and lack of access to employment, quality education, and other resources contribute to the social exclusion of a growing number of disadvantaged young people. They are deprived of the possibilities of leading a decent life and alienated from both the market and legitimate authorities. Despite their social, political, and economic marginalization, many of these precarious Congolese youth have proved adept at improvising livelihoods in the informal economy and seek out ways to be agents of social change.

Too few epidemiologists in humanitarian crises: a critical gap that needs addressing. A new course organised by the Italian Association of Epidemiology

The current humanitarian crises in Ukraine and Gaza, along with the chronic crises, and the climate-related disasters, have exposed the limitations of the humanitarian system. Within these contexts, humanitarian organisations frequently struggle with collecting, analysing, interpreting, and utilising health data, due to the challenging environments in which they operate and funding constraints. It is precisely in these contexts that field epidemiology plays a crucial, but often overlooked role.Field epidemiologists face unique challenges, including rapidly changing conditions, poor-quality data, and biases. Despite these difficulties, accurate epidemiological data are essential for needs assessment, guidance on interventions, and advocacy. Conventional methods often need adaptation for crisis settings, and there are still gaps in measurement.This article discusses the role of epidemiology in such contexts, noting a shortage of trained 'humanitarian epidemiologists' and specialised training as major issues.To address these needs, the Italian Association of Epidemiology organised a course in early 2024 to enhance the epidemiological skills of staff working in humanitarian crises and introduce traditional epidemiologists to crisis-specific challenges. The course covered key concepts and methods of field epidemiology, emphasising the use of secondary health data. Its positive reception underscored the demand for such specialised training.Improving public health information collection and use in humanitarian crises is an ethical and practical necessity. Indeed, investing in field epidemiology and recognising its importance can enhance humanitarian interventions and better serve vulnerable populations.

Perfil do professor do ensino jurídico: visões e tensões sobre ser e fazer docente

Abstract The lack of didactic-pedagogical training of professors for teaching work is one of the facets of the chronic crisis affecting legal education. However, it is not enough to offer this training, it is necessary to discuss the theoretical-conceptual concepts that guide the training process, as these are responsible for outlining the contours of the profile of the professor that is sought to be trained and the model of legal education that is sought to consolidate. Therefore, the objective of this article is to understand the implications of didactic-pedagogical training offered through stricto sensu postgraduate academic courses in law, taking as a premise the perceptions of graduates regarding being and doing teaching, thus outlining, the profiles of legal education professors. Bibliographic and field research, qualitative data treatment and content analysis were the methodological guidelines for the development of the research. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 90 legal education professors who graduated from master’s or doctorate courses in law located in the State of Paraná between 2017 and 2020. In the final considerations, the prevalence of the technical-practical profile (27%) was verified. regarding the conception of a legal education professor, which reveals a pragmatic and instrumental view of being and doing teaching. However, it was also noted the emergency of a critical-emancipatory vision of teaching (23%), a profile that has as its parameter the formation of an agent who transforms reality, committed to the humanization of the subject.

Multimorbidity as chronic crisis: 'Living on' with multiple long-term health conditions in a socially disadvantaged London borough.

Contemporary health services are primarily designed around single diseases. People with multimorbidity (multiple long-term health conditions) often become burdened by accumulated treatments. Through multimodal fieldwork in a socially disadvantaged London borough, we explore how people living with multimorbidity navigate conditions of 'chronic crisis', encompassing ill-health, overmedicalisation, polypharmacy and social exclusion. Participants in our study frequently experience 'existential stuckness', exacerbated by processes of social exclusion. We argue that diagnoses and treatments should account for people's unique aetiologies, and prioritise the notion of 'flourishing' over 'cure' as the absence of disease is not always achievable. To foster this emphasis on flourishing, we advocate for a dialogical turn in diagnostic processes that better support patients' existential needs in the context of long-term illness.

Financial Contagion of Russian Companies during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The article examines the financial contagion of Russian companies during the pandemic COVID-19. Financial contagion refers to the strengthening of interconnections between segments of the financial market during a crisis, when turbulence from one market is transferred to others, and the relationship between parameters goes beyond normal market interactions. The study involved shares of 27 companies in the energy, financial, telecommunications, consumer and raw materials sectors of the Russian economy. As exogenous variables supposedly influencing the market values of these companies, we tested the rouble exchange rate against the US dollar, the spot price of Urals oil and the yield on annual government bonds (proxies for the cost of borrowings). Identification of the potential contagion period was based of the sliding coefficientof variation of these variables. The construction of VARX models convincingly proved the increasing influenceof the exchange rate and the bond yield rate on the fundamental (market) return of Russian companies in the short term (during the acute phase of the pandemic) and the delayed impact of oil prices on it, which manifested itself during the chronic crisis. Contagion testing was also carried out on the basis of a change (growth) in the coefficient of determination in the acute phase of the pandemic as compared to the pre-crisis and post-crisis periods. For a more accurate assessment of the contribution of each variable to contagion, we used the method of source decomposition of the coefficient of determination with a correction for heteroscedasticity. This made it possible to identify the companies most vulnerable tofinancial contagion during the pandemic, and the sources of their contagion, as well as the market segments that showed the greatest resilience. The study can be useful for managers in maintaining their companies’ market value, for investors in effective portfolio diversification, and for public authorities when pursuing a policy of financial stabilization in a crisis. The limitations of the study are related to the imperfections of the VARX models method, as well as to the specifics of the pandemic crisis, the conclusions from which can only be partially applied to other types of crises.

ON FUTURES AND ENDINGS: NARRATOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF CRISES*

ABSTRACTThe article examines the changing relationship of the present to the future from a narratological perspective. It argues that three dominant narrative schemas structure the contemporary experiences of temporality in the Western social imaginary: the modern crisis narrative, the apocalyptic narrative, and the chronic crisis narrative. In its first part, the article shows how the modern sense of crisis, which emerged in the late eighteenth century, sedimented into a powerful narrative template by knitting together the past, the present, and the future into a unified plot. The second part focuses on the resurgence of apocalyptic stories in the Western social imaginary and humanities discourse. The final part highlights the special contribution of aesthetics of precariousness to the Western imaginary of time and temporality. It argues that the “chronic crisis narrative” deflates the teleological narrative arc of the modern crisis paradigm while also shunning the end‐time discourse of the apocalyptic narrative.

Experiences of US Clinicians Contending With Health Care Resource Scarcity During the COVID-19 Pandemic, December 2020 to December 2021

The second year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw periods of dire health care resource limitations in the US, sometimes prompting official declarations of crisis, but little is known about how these conditions were experienced by frontline clinicians. To describe the experiences of US clinicians practicing under conditions of extreme resource limitation during the second year of the pandemic. This qualitative inductive thematic analysis was based on interviews with physicians and nurses providing direct patient care at US health care institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Interviews were conducted between December 28, 2020, and December 9, 2021. Crisis conditions as reflected by official state declarations and/or media reports. Clinicians' experiences as obtained through interviews. Interviews with 23 clinicians (21 physicians and 2 nurses) who were practicing in California, Idaho, Minnesota, or Texas were included. Of the 23 total participants, 21 responded to a background survey to assess participant demographics; among these individuals, the mean (SD) age was 49 (7.3) years, 12 (57.1%) were men, and 18 (85.7%) self-identified as White. Three themes emerged in qualitative analysis. The first theme describes isolation. Clinicians had a limited view on what was happening outside their immediate practice setting and perceived a disconnect between official messaging about crisis conditions and their own experience. In the absence of overarching system-level support, responsibility for making challenging decisions about how to adapt practices and allocate resources often fell to frontline clinicians. The second theme describes in-the-moment decision-making. Formal crisis declarations did little to guide how resources were allocated in clinical practice. Clinicians adapted practice by drawing on their clinical judgment but described feeling ill equipped to handle some of the operationally and ethically complex situations that fell to them. The third theme describes waning motivation. As the pandemic persisted, the strong sense of mission, duty, and purpose that had fueled extraordinary efforts earlier in the pandemic was eroded by unsatisfying clinical roles, misalignment between clinicians' own values and institutional goals, more distant relationships with patients, and moral distress. The findings of this qualitative study suggest that institutional plans to protect frontline clinicians from the responsibility for allocating scarce resources may be unworkable, especially in a state of chronic crisis. Efforts are needed to directly integrate frontline clinicians into institutional emergency responses and support them in ways that reflect the complex and dynamic realities of health care resource limitation.

An Acute Crisis adds to Unresolved Chronic Crisis

Residents in a community in the South Peninsula of the Western Cape, South Africa live with the reality of unresolved challenges. The women and children of this community face a burden from the prevailing inequality and structural violence that plays out in their daily lives as high levels of unemployment, substance abuse, violence in many forms, food insecurity, high school dropout rates and teenage pregnancy. The complexities of living in this community were exacerbated by the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown regulations that destabilised all previous notions of normality. The pre-existing social challenges can be viewed as the residents’ experiences of hazards and stressors that have been in place for years in the unequal social structures of South Africa (The World Bank 2022). In this environment, of what can be interpreted as a community in chronic crisis (Dekker et al., 2021), the addition of the acute crisis of the pandemic, posed further cumulative effects on households that impacted more seriously on those who are already the most vulnerable. This paper presents reflections on the stories of women talking about their experiences of the global pandemic to this coastal community. We aim to show the impact on their lives as members of families within their community. The analysis will utilise the phases of a crisis (Emergency Management, 2022) where the pre-crisis or prodromal phase was recognised as life in the chronic crisis of structural violence. The acute or crisis phase of the pandemic became a lens for the effects of an existing long-term crisis compounded by athe. The response or chronic phase of the acute crisis was again found to be exacerbated by the existence of a long drawn out response phase to the chronic crisis. This paper is a window into the innovative attempts by this community to cope with the immense challenges of Covid-19, followed now by the post-crisis (resolution) phase that reflects the ongoing efforts to rebuild the community in the face of the cumulative effects of the pandemic, as but a temporary diversion from the challenges of a continuous chronic crisis. The post-crisis phase remains incomplete, however, a deeper understanding of crisis upon crisis provides knowledge that can assist those implementing social interventions in this community to tackle challenges as a state of chronic crisis for residents.

Through the Eyes of a Strategist and a Diplomat: Polish-American Relations post-1918

Through the Eyes of a Strategist and a Diplomat: Polish-American Relations post-1918

Emotional stabilization interventions for people exposed to chronic traumatic events, in humanitarian settings

Introduction In contexts of chronic crisis, such as wars, the population is affected by prolonged traumatic exposure. In this type of context, it is sometimes difficult to provide psychological support to work through the trauma because the environment is neither stable nor reassuring. It is about finding care devices that despite the complexity of the situation, manage to bring relief and improve the ability to manage negative emotions and stress. Objectives The objective of the intervention was to relieve people in distress, to help them contain their reactions to moments of anxiety so that they are more available and calm in their daily lives. Since the intervention could not provide long-term treatment for the potential traumatic stress, due to the abuses still in progress, it aimed to prevent the appearance and installation of the symptoms. Methods A group protocol based on emotional stabilization exercises was offered to children and adults from communities affected by the fighting in the civil war in the Central African Republic in 2021. In addition to giving elements of psychoeducation, participants could practice exercises aimed at stabilizing emotions and managing stress. People could benefit from this psychosocial support with daily frequency for four consecutive days. At the beginning and at the end of the care device, psychometric scales were administered in order to be able to measure the improvement in well-being (WHO5) the reduction in symptoms of anxiety and depression (HAD) as well as traumatic symptoms in adults (PCL -5) and children (CPTS-RI). Results Between February and April 2021, 1,200 adults and 400 children were able to participate in the emotional stabilization device. 90% of the participants showed an improvement in well-being and a reduction in stress and axiety reactions. The participants particularly appreciated the exercises for the ease with which they could be reproduced in daily life and transmitted to other members of the family and the community. Despite the fact that exposure to stress remained significant and daily, they expressed the feeling of having regained some control, at least over their own emotions and reactions. Conclusions In situations of chronic stress, where psychic traumatic symptoms cannot be treated sustainably, this emotional stabilization protocol can be an effective option to regulate the emotional states of exposed people and give them tools to cope with anxiety. Two important points to emphasize are also the fact that this device can reach a large part of the population without a lot of means and that it can be provided by non-professionals in mental health, if properly trained and constantly supervised by experts. Disclosure of Interest None Declared

Care commons: Infrastructural (re)compositions for life sustenance through yet against regimes of chronic crisis

Infrastructures constitute key sites in the contemporary crisis regime. Emerging infrastructural configurations, particularly in the urban setting, are raising questions about the possibilities and challenges that these transformations may bring regarding more just and sustainable modes of social provision. Attention is being drawn to the grassroots, where experiments with novel forms of organisation are bringing about new collective contexts and political conceptions. In this context, infrastructure has been proposed as a concept to both examine contemporary crises and devise ways to cope with breakdown that can gesture towards living alternatives at the service of life. In this article, I engage this debate through an ethnographic study of two grassroots initiatives in Athens (Greece) intervening in the realm of life sustenance. I will show that these people-driven initiatives (re)compose networked infrastructures in ways that advance organisational modes of social provision different to institutions, and forms of political engagement and possibility. They do so by infrastructuring care through commoning. I will argue that infrastructural systems of care commons contribute to an infrastructural imagination that moves away from modern ideals towards values of relationality, conductivity, care and repair, which may nurture a transformative politics for a world in crisis, yet against crisis regimes.

Distressed Work: Chronic Imperatives and Distress in Covid‐19 Critical Care

This ethnographic study introduces the term "distressed work" to describe the emergence of chronic frictions between moral imperatives for health care workers to keep working and the dramatic increase in distress during the Covid-19 pandemic. Interviews and observant participation conducted in a hospital intensive care unit during the Covid-19 pandemic reveal how health care workers connected job duties with extraordinary emotional, physical, and moral burdens. We explore tensions between perceived obligations of health care professionals and the structural contexts of work. Key findings cluster around the moral imperatives of health care work and the distress that work engendered as work spaces, senses of vocation, patient and family interactions, and end-of-life care shifted. While the danger of working beyond limits has long been an ordinary feature of health care work, it has now become a chronic crisis. Assessing this problem in terms of distressed work and its structural contexts can better address effective, worker-informed responses to current health care labor dilemmas.

Demoralizing care: Moral and ethical dilemmas of parenting a young adult who lives with a borderline diagnosis

AbstractThis article theorizes chronic crises of care parents face concerning how to morally/ethically support their young adult child diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Grounded in five years’ attendance at a support group for families living with BPD and interviews with parents, the article asks: In the era of deinstitutionalization of those with mental illness, what are the moral/ethical dimensions of parents’ experiences caring for their young adult? The concept of demoralization and “moral breakdown,” an ethical crisis demanding a resolution, characterizes parents’ experiences. The parents featured convey anguished struggles over what they ought to do in a context where risks are high, and nothing parents do seems right. I suggest that dwelling indefinitely in demoralizing care is untenable and that a state of demoralization emerges as a testimony to the parents’ inability to identify a morally/ethically acceptable resolution to the crises of care.

Chronic crisis: 30 years on from the Dublin Principles and still no market to value water

ABSTRACT Solving the global water crisis requires water to be economically mobile. Well-regulated water markets that can allocate scarce water resources to their best economic, social and environmental uses will require rigorous water accounting; access to the resource by legal, transparent and enforced permits; and a market where permitted water can be sold by users that have more than enough to other potential users that can make better use of it. This will involve exclusion of the weaponization of water for the exercise of power and dismantling market distortions such as agricultural subsidies that are rarely aimed at better water management.

The Crisis of Everyday Liveability, Policy and Politics

AbstractThis article develops a distinctive foundational analysis of what is loosely termed the ‘everyday economy’. The ‘cost of living crisis’ is analysed as an acute crisis of household liveability which overlays a decade‐long chronic crisis. This is caused by the crumbling of all three pillars of liveability: disposable and residual income, essential services and social infrastructure. Mainstream economists and politicians fail to understand or respond to these chronic problems because they continue to assert and assume that higher wages will deliver better living standards. Effective response requires not only a reset of central state policies, but also a rethinking of politics so that government recognises and empowers the diverse and distributed sources of social innovation.

Legitimacy crises in embedded democracies

Recently, many comparativists and democratic theorists have argued that democracy is in imminent peril, even in countries that are thought to be its strongholds. But theorists like Andrew Gamble, Wolfgang Streeck, and David Runciman suggest that some democracies are too embedded to collapse. Instead, they argue these democracies are experiencing long-term structural crises. This article explains how this alternative kind of crisis works. It conceives of legitimacy crises as ‘chronic crises’ in which democratic procedures are contested even as the democratic political system is affirmed. In these crises, democracies are threatened by distortion and deadlock rather than death. The article gives a precise account of chronic legitimacy crises. It treats legitimacy as a scalar concept, going beyond binary views where legitimacy is something a state either has or lacks. It distinguishes periods of chronic crisis from stable periods and from acute crises. It shows how chronic crises are distinctively about legitimacy. It carves out conceptual space for a different kind of legitimacy crisis, and it assists comparativists in thinking about how younger democracies differ from older ones.

Chronic crisis and nuclear disaster humanitarianism: recuperation of Chernobyl and Fukushima children in Italy

This article situates Henrik Vigh’s concept of ‘chronic crisis’ in social disaster research and humanitarian studies in order to explore how child survivors experience and address the prolonged consequences of disasters. The rationale for mobilising the concept of chronic crisis is that it opens up possibilities for exploring the dynamics and multidimensionality of disasters and humanitarian responses to them. Using the example of nuclear disasters, the article looks at the enduring humanitarian initiatives of Italian non-governmental organisations in recuperating Chernobyl and Fukushima children in Italy. It focuses on the opportunities, challenges and outcomes of these recuperative programmes, and underscores the non-linearity of survivor agency. The article argues that chronic crisis in nuclear disasters can simultaneously contribute to deterioration and ruination of survivors’ lives, catharsis, and hope. It is further argued that humanitarianism can shape chronic crisis either by exacerbating the already-precarious conditions of human existence (through social discrimination and prejudice), or by alleviating survivor suffering (through social and cultural support).

The ends of perpetual crisis

We now live in perpetual crisis: ‘an age of crisis’, ‘times of crisis’, ‘chronic crisis’ and so on. These expressions seem to merely describe a state of affairs, but they are foundational claims. The concept of crisis qualifies a world: it determines what gets to count as an event and what gets inscribed as history in the ongoing stream of competing phenomena. Crisis is a naturalising category that subsumes specificity. It has colonised the life-worlds of communities across the globe and become foundational to knowledge production despite its Christian-European genealogy. Analyses that attempt to gain insights by elucidating discourses of crisis, or how people use the term ‘crisis’, and the experience of crisis, or how people narrate crisis, disregard the constitutive questions that make crisis a primary means of qualifying the observable world. Asking those constitutive questions has political import because they raise the long-standing problem of representation – of the Other, of alterity, of language and of experience. The problem of representation has been a central topic of epistemology and the principal subject of critique in the social sciences and humanities. It should not be ignored, and it compels us to ask: what becomes of the concept of crisis when we problematise practices of representation?

Chronic Crisis Novels and the Quest for “the Good-Enough Life”: Kathrin Röggla’sdie alarmbereiten, Kristine Bilkau’sDie Glücklichen, and Thorsten Nagelschmidt’sArbeit

This article discusses the literary engagement with chronic crises as the prevailing condition of the early twenty-first century. Chronic crisis narration dislodges the narrative modes and epistemological frames of modern crisis scenarios: crisis no longer designates the experience of a decisive tipping point after a climactic build-up but rather an enduring state of extremity, requiring uninterrupted resilience. The chronic crisis novel experiments with anthropologically inflected modes of narration to articulate the subjective and social experience of precarity, exhaustion, and the depletion of resources. However, by aesthetically reclaiming precariousness as the domain of relationality and pleasure, this genre also explores the idea of the “good-enough life” as a viable alternative to the middle-class expectation of the good life.