Crisis Narratives Research Articles

Topologies and topographies of Ireland's neoliberal crisis

In this paper, we explore successive waves of neoliberalization in Ireland. We contend that neoliberalization remained largely “invisible” during the Celtic Tiger because a property bubble permitted a period of debt-driven growth, but was revealed and politicized by the crisis. Mobilizing the ideas of topology and topography, we explore the relationships which unfolded between the “financialization” of the global economy and the two twin pillars of the Irish crisis narrative: property and debt. We conclude that there is a need for future studies to consider how neoliberalism, financialization and uneven development are being reshaped by geographically situated responses to the crisis.

Narrative Fortresses: Crisis Narratives and Conflict in the Conservation of Mount Gorongosa, Mozambique

A single narrative about the Gorongosa Restoration Project (GRP) in Mozambique circulates widely in the popular media. This story characterises the project as an innovative intervention into an ecological crisis situation. The narrative hails the project's aim to use profits from tourism to address the goals of both human development and conservation of biodiversity, and portrays the park project as widely embraced by long-term residents. This representation helps the project attract broad acclaim, donor funding, and socially conscious visitors, yet it obscures the early emergence of unified opposition to the project's interventions among long-term residents of Gorongosa Mountain. This article draws on ethnographic research conducted on Gorongosa Mountain between 2006 and 2008 to examine the project's early activities there. I examine two crisis narratives that led to entrenched conflict between park-based actors and mountain residents. Focusing on the emergence and solidification of divergent narratives-narrative fortresses-about the extension of the park's activities to Gorongosa Mountain offers insight into the powerful role of crisis narratives in producing and maintaining conflict, leading to outcomes counter to the desires of conservationists. Ultimately, the article points to ways in which narratives of environmental crisis work against aspirations of partnership and collaboration with resident populations in conservation and development schemes.

Conservation Narratives and Their Implications in the Coral Triangle Initiative

Conserving coral reefs, sustaining fisheries, and ensuring food security are multi-faceted challenges. Six nations in the Southeast Asia Coral Triangle have agreed to a region-wide framework to address these challenges through the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI). Based on a review of documentation, selected discussions and ongoing work in the region, we offer an initial assessment of narratives influencing conservation practice in the CTI. Current efforts in the CTI are framed by a crisis narrative that emphasises the importance of maintaining critical ecosystems and baseline conditions. This narrative has a strong empirical basis but it can also exacerbate a dualistic view of people and nature. However, CTI documentation and programming also reflect a recognition of linked social-ecological change and the historical co-evolution of communities and coastal-marine systems. This emerging narrative places an emphasis on building resilience to change, rather than resisting change. We do not advocate here for a single narrative with which to frame policy responses in the CTI, but rather draw attention to the ways that mainstreaming of certain narratives will have material effects on initiatives and programmes promoted in this region of globally significant marine biodiversity.

Reinventing Paradise: the Greek Crisis and contemporary British travel narratives

In the second half of the twentieth century Greece became a subject for travel writers in search of a European ‘Paradise’. But ‘Hell was also to be found in Greece, often in the form of frustrations over allegedly ‘non-European’ standards of living, facilities, and attitudes. A sample of travel narratives published between 2006 and 2014 suggests the extent to which, in the light of the ‘Greek Crisis’, twenty-first-century writers are abandoning these formerly conventional themes. There is now the potential for the realignment of narratives, with Greece becoming the Hell, rather than the Heaven, of Europe.

Time of crises

This paper analyzes a specific relationship between ideology as an anti- historical category and the narratives underlying the novel The Time of Miracles by Borislav Pekic. It highlights the key features of immutable and always the same ideological mechanisms, regardless of the contents of ideas in whose name they act. Among many ideological tools, there is narration as a primary means to produce an ideological system as an instrument of action based on the perception of community. However, narrative techniques also represent the only means that enables freedom. By forgetting about the symbiosis of ideology and narrative, the Serbian literary scene is at a narrative crisis due to its sterile wandering through the text. The solution out of the crisis is not in ignoring the ideological nature of storytelling, but in finding the right distance between the complex reality that surrounds us and the ideas that guide us.

Multiple voices and multiple media: Co-constructing BP's crisis response

This article explores the impact of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on the field of crisis communication, and argues that the term “crisis response” needs to be re-conceptualized in order to include the polyvocality of crisis response enabled by online media. This article deconstructs the crisis response to the British Petroleum (BP) Oil Spill from organizational, media, and stakeholder perspectives. Using semantic network analysis, linguistic maps of news articles, press releases, BP Facebook posts, and stakeholder Facebook posts were created to detect the core messages of each group and to determine the roles that source and media play in creating crisis response. Findings support the idea that both source and media contribute to the overall crisis narrative, emphasizing the importance of online media in both organizational and stakeholder response. This study offers insight into the emotional contributions of stakeholder response to the overall crisis narrative, as well as, suggests a new element of dialogic communication called inter-media dialog.

Requiem for a “Tough Guy”: Representing Hockey Labor, Violence and Masculinity in Goon

This paper explores the ongoing construction of hockey in Canada through a textual analysis of the popular comedy, Goon (2012). Touted by its authors as “the Canadian sequel to Slap Shot” and “an homage to enforcers”, Goon is analyzed in relation to simmering debates about fighting in hockey as well as the broader crisis of employment and masculinity that characterize the sociopolitical milieu in which the film circulates. A crisis of masculinity narrative is found to emerge in and through a discourse about working-class labor that both celebrates and devalorizes violent labor and the capitalist relations in which it is embedded. The analysis provides insight into the interlocking relationships among texts and contexts as well as the role of sport films in perpetuating dominant ideologies about violent labor in hockey.

Women and the European crisis

AbstractThe article raises questions about how the economic crisis is being played out ‘in place’, taking an embodied, generational and gender perspective. ‘Place’ is used in a political context by examining how global realities are experienced in place, and the author argues the need to look at the everyday realities of the crisis from a gendered ontological perspective in order to counter grand narratives of gloom and doom where women (whether old, young, migrant, heterosexual or otherwise) are particular victims. By discussing local contexts of the gendered realities of the crisis in three southern Europe areas, the author shows the possibility of changing the crisis narrative from one of overwhelming paralysis to one of potential transformation. The focus is on the rise of resistance, solidarity economies and new types of communities in the search by women in southern Europe for alternatives to neoliberal capitalism.

The crisis of the Spanish economy

This article offers a narrative of the Spanish crisis building upon previous literature and the papers published in this issue. This narrative focuses on two main topics: (1) the reasons why the Spanish economy embarked in the expansionary/speculative path resulting in an over-accumulation of debt and severe macroeconomic imbalances that led to the crisis, and (2) the factors that explain why the Spanish crisis materialized with such a high intensity and duration. The article addresses them by highlighting three main characteristics of the Spanish economy in the pre-crisis period: (1) a composition of economic activity increasingly biased towards construction, real state, and other non-tradeable sectors, (2) a banking system that was able to satisfy the huge increase in credit demand arising from households and firms, in a context of very low real interest rates, excessive optimism about growth, and large facilities for using real assets as loan collateral, and (3) the recourse to external funding that originated an unprecedented increase in liabilities with respect to the rest of the world.

Sovereign Debt or Balance of Payments Crisis? Exploring the Structural Logic of Adjustment in the Eurozone

This paper provides an alternative interpretation of the euro crisis to the dominant sovereign debt narrative. I argue that at the core of the euro crisis is a balance of payments disequilibrium—only this time the balance of payments crisis is taking place within a common currency. The frame of reference—sovereign debt crisis or balance of payments crisis—makes a significant difference not only for determining the causes of the euro crisis but also for the adequacy of policy measures to address the crisis. The sovereign debt crisis narrative has missed the interrelated nature of the macroeconomic imbalances within the eurozone. Despite the expectation of many observers at the time of the creation of the euro that the common currency would distribute the burden of adjustment more evenly across its member countries, the reverse is actually true. Compared to the European Monetary Union's predecessor regime, the European Monetary System (EMS), deficit countries are saddled with even higher adjustment costs in the common currency than before. In particular, they no longer have the tool of a nominal exchange rate change to address balance of payments disequilibria. This situation allows surplus countries—most importantly Germany—to exercise leverage over the key bargaining issues at stake in solving the eurozone crisis.

Paradoxes of ethically branded bottled water: constituting the solution to the world water crisis

This paper draws attention to the growing role of corporate marketing in the cultural production of crisis narratives. We examine ethically branded bottled water products that encourage the purchase of bottled water as one means of solving the global water crisis. The brands make a donation to a development organization addressing water issues each time a bottle of water is purchased. Through this process consumers are encouraged to ‘save lives’ and ‘engage’ in ‘alleviating the world water crisis’ through buying one brand of bottled water over another. These brands are somewhat paradoxical because they portray the consumption of products that many consider environmentally, economically and socially harmful as an ethical practice. We undertake a discourse analysis of the marketing materials for Ethos Water (one such ethically branded water product) in order to examine how a version of the world water crisis is constituted by the brand. Using the concept of problem closure, we argue that the cultural production of the world water crisis as natural and apolitical; as dislocated from specific places and environments; and as an opportunity for ethical awakening among consumers, results in the consumption of Ethos Water being constituted as a viable solution to such a crisis.

The Life Cycle of a Virus: The Infectious Disease Narrative of NDM-1

This study is a report of a two-part content analysis of domestic and international print news reports (over a 3-year period) that examined how the nature of the New Delhi Metallo-beta-lactamase-1 (NDM-1) virus and the severity of the threat were conveyed to global audiences. In particular, the authors focused on the ongoing crisis narrative of NDM-1 and the potentially negative outcomes of international communication warning and false alarm systems regarding global health threats. The results indicated key differences in media narratives between the initial 2011 outbreak and the 2012 postcrisis state. The authors examine the theoretical and practical implications of the findings as well as key limitations and directions for future research.

Encountering knowledge production: the International Crisis Group and the making of Mexico’s security crisis

After nearly seven years of ever-escalating violence related to the Mexican ‘war on drugs’, in 2013 Mexico entered the International Crisis Group’s (icg) ‘observatory’ of countries facing a violent crisis. In this article we critically interrogate this ‘Mexican turn’ of the icg, as well as its accompanying forms of crisis knowledge production. By applying analytical insights from critical policy analysis and postcolonial security studies, we highlight the Western-centrism embedded in the icg’s perspective on Mexico’s security crisis. In analysing this perspective on questions of drug trafficking, statehood and indigenous justice, we demonstrate how this Western-centrism produces a de-politicising and overly technocratic crisis narrative. The article concludes that, through its Western-centric ‘Mexican turn’, the icg has been able to reaffirm its standing as a uniquely influential and internationally recognised crisis expert by showcasing its awareness of newly emerging crisis situations, as well as its possession of the necessary crisis-solving expertise.

Back to the capitalist future: Fantasy and the paradox of crisis

This paper draws on a Lacanian perspective to better understand how crisis can paradoxically produce fantasies of ideological renewal. Using the 2008 economic meltdown as an example, it argues that these events are articulated as a part of a crisis narrative that links past ideals with future stability and progress. At the level of subjectivity, these fantasies reflect the psychological trauma individuals feel in the face of encountering the incoherent and fragmentary ‘Real’ of their identity during periods of greater social and economic upheaval. In the context of the current crisis, political leaders attempted to reinforce capitalist ideologies through promoting a fantasy of recovery that connected future prosperity with values of financialization and a global ‘free market’, as is borne out in their public statements following this event. Critically, this points to the importance of ‘traversing’ these fantasies in order to break free from desires for renewal in favour of those emphasizing transformation.

The Horrors of Slavery and Crisis of Humanity in Amistad and 12 Years a Slave

Solomon Northup’s testimonial 12 Years a Slave (1853) tells the heart-wrenching story of how a free black man living in New York was captured by slave traders and forced to live as a slave on southern plantations in the 1840s under inhuman and oppressive conditions. Writing up and publishing his experiences, Northup presents a searing portrayal of the evils of slavery that influenced abolitionist arguments and movements in the pre-Civil War period as debates over slavery intensified, leading to the bloodiest war in American history. The horrors of slavery created a crisis of humanity in the United States in which a class of Americans participated in slave-holding, a practice that was seen in some parts of the country as causing a crisis of humanity in which millions were subjected to inhuman living working and living conditions. While the U.S. constitution and American revolution had produced “liberty and justice for all,” and proclaimed equal rights before the law obviously the system of slavery created a crisis for U.S. constitutional democracy that led to a Civil War that almost tore the country apart. Hollywood cinema has traditionally been reluctant to portray the horrors of slavery, providing idealizations of slavery in films like Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939), and tending to ignore it during the highly charged post-World War II period that featured an intensifying powerful Civil Rights movement. Steve McQueen’s 2013 film provides a powerful cinematic rendition of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave and has been affirmed as one of the one most powerful films on slavery ever produced, a film being nominated for and winning multiple awards as I write in winter 2014. In this article, I will contrast Gordon Parks’ relatively unknown PBS “American Experience” film of 1984 Solomon Northup’s Odyssey with McQueen’s film, although I open with a look back at Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), which presents a 1839 slave revolt on a ship bound to the Americas and the subsequent trial of the rebels. The Amistad rebellion and trial, like Northup’s book, influenced the abolitionist movement and is a significant, although often forgotten moment in U.S. history. Hence, the current discussions of McQueen’s highly acclaimed film provide the opportunity for a look backwards at a painful moment in U.S. history and for discussion of different modes of cinematic representation of slavery and how a crisis of humanity in the U.S. has received different modes of cinematic representation. Accordingly, I will contrast Spielberg’s film with Parks’ and McQueen’s presentations of slavery in their versions of Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. Although Spielberg’s Amistad contains many features of dominant American ideology and an individualist Hollywood narrative which informs Spielberg’s liberal cinema, it is perhaps the most modernist and one of the most compelling of Spielberg’s films that deserves a second look and comparison with Park and McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. I will, however, first examine Amistad which provides a broader panorama of the system and complex effects of slavery in U.S. life and history than Parks’ powerful narrative of Northup’s book and McQueen’s more concentrated and intense focus on the horrors of slavery in 12 Years a Slave. I contrast Parks’ use of classical realist modes of representation with McQueen’s aestheticized and modernist version. Juxtaposing different cinematic representations of slavery and cinematic renditions of Northup’s slave testimony, I show how McQueen’s film provides a modernist version of Northup’s text that forces the audience to experience the horrors of slavery and crisis of humanity, while Parks uses a conventional realist narrative to tell Northup’s story and depict the institutions of slavery. These films, I believe, are among the best English-language cinematic efforts to engage the “peculiar” and arguably monstrous American institution of slavery that continues to shape our history today into the Obama era.Palabras clave: Esclavitud; Crisis de la humanidad; Narrativas de la crisis; Hollywood; Steven Spielberg; Steve McQueen Keywords: Slavery; Crisis of Humanity; Narratives of Crisis; Hollywood; Steven Spielberg; Steve McQueen

A Crisis of Crisis Narratives?

What is at stake in “crisis” narratives? From the outset, it seems unproblematic to maintain that there have recently been several economic crises—most prominently the subprime crisis in the United...

La crisis del UPAC a través de la mirada de los jueces. Un estudio de caso en la ciudad de Barranquilla (Colombia)

La Revista de Derecho es una publicación arbitrada, de carácter semestral, que tiene por objeto la divulgación de la producción intelectual internacional resultado de proyectos de investigación, en el campo del derecho y la ciencia política.

‘We're Reaping What We Sowed’: Everyday Crisis Narratives and Acquiescence to the Age of Austerity

The British public have seemingly accepted the inevitability of the Coalition-government's ambitious fiscal consolidation plan despite the fact that it may harm many. In this context of general acquiescence, many existing accounts appeal to elites: notably, how the narration of a Debt Crisis has rendered the ‘age of austerity’ as both a logical and common-sense response to the UK ‘living beyond its means’ in the pre-crisis years. Utilising the notion that elite-driven crisis narratives must resonate with the ‘mood of the times’, this paper analyses non-elite crisis narratives. Specifically, it looks at how homeowners from middle-class neighbourhoods justify fiscal consolidation – drawing on a series of focus group interviews to do so. It is argued that the shared popular wisdom and experiences are extrapolated from the personal to make sense of the state level – but in a way that tends to legitimise spending cuts. A key aspect to this mood of the times, it is argued, is the notion that the British public are, as one participant put it, ‘reaping what we sowed’.

Everyday emergency: crisis, unease and strategy in contemporary political discourse

Contemporary politics is marked by a proliferation of crises and crisis narratives. This article focuses, however, not on discrete crisis narratives but on an important characteristic of contemporary politics: a sense of constant crisis and a related sense of pervasive unease and anxiety. Drawing on the notions of the governmentality of unease and of the discourse of strategy, the article argues that diverse actors construct a narrative of constant crisis in order to affirm their status and legitimacy as the providers of necessary protection. This sense of constant crisis serves to legitimate certain actors, naturalize certain policy responses and normalize certain social outcomes. It operates by acting on the subjectivities of individuals, which are seen as structured not just through rational calculation but also – and importantly – through fear, anxiety and unease in the face of this constant crisis.

The English riots of 2011: Summoning community, depoliticising the city

The urban uprisings which occurred across England in the summer of 2011 are deemed in this paper to highlight the unstable, depoliticised ‘publics’ being increasingly convened within neo-liberalised cities. It contends that the diverse, dispersed and multiple events of August 2011 were ‘staged’ and ‘storied’ by assorted media and political narratives to represent socio-spatial ‘communities’ as fallen, harmed or resurgent entities. The paper exposes some of the evidential limitations of these reworkings but largely focuses on these imaginaries to reflect on how they implicate the city in the delineation of fragile and contradictory socio-spatial formations emerging from, through and in response to neo-liberalisation. In this regard, the scripting of the ‘riots’ around narratives of community crisis and redemption belies the sifting, bordering and reproducing of urban populations through the strategic governing dualities of abjection/exclusion and participation/responsibility. The paper suggests that these modalities produce landscapes of both depoliticisation and contingent disruption, an apparent contradiction which appears to be both intensifying and unravelling in a period of ‘alchemic austerity’, and which renders logics of restructuring as both unremitting and glaringly problematic.