Crisis Narratives Research Articles

Le cap des 100 millions en Égypte. Discours de crise et stratégies à l’aune des changements environnementaux globaux

Avec plus de 100 millions d’habitants, l’Égypte est un géant démographique. Le pays gagne désormais un million d’habitants tous les 7 mois et sa population est extrêmement jeune : deux tiers des Égyptiens ont moins de 30 ans. Dans un pays désertique à 96 %, cette augmentation soutenue de la population est présentée comme alarmante. Depuis les années 1950, un discours de crise se construit dans les déclarations politiques et dans les médias. La croissance démographique est accusée de tous les maux du pays : pauvreté, « retards de développement », insécurité, construction illégale, etc. Dans un contexte de changements environnementaux globaux, ce discours se teinte d’une dimension environnementaliste insistant sur la rareté des ressources, en premier lieu l’eau et les terres arables. En s’appuyant sur la presse et sur des entretiens menés dans la région du Delta, cet article analyse le discours de crise qui reporte la responsabilité sur les classes populaires. Face à ce qui est présenté comme un défi majeur, des politiques publiques de réduction de la natalité et des politiques territoriales de fronts pionniers dans le désert – bonification des terres et villes nouvelles – sont menées depuis plusieurs décennies et s’accélèrent aujourd’hui.

Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David B. Diamond

Reviewed by: Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation by David B. Diamond Jonathan A. Cook (bio) David B. Diamond, Psychoanalytic Readings of Hawthorne’s Romances: Narratives of Unconscious Crisis and Transformation Although the fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for the acuity of its psychological insights, surprisingly few critical studies have addressed this topic beyond exploring the pervasive presence of the Puritan doctrine of original sin and its varied psychological sources and consequences. In The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966), Frederick Crews produced an influential study of Hawthorne’s fiction premised on the theory that unresolved Oedipal aggressions and repressed sexual drives suffused the author’s work—but the passage of time has revealed the reductive nature of many of Crews’s findings, even as the author formally renounced his embrace of Freudian models and expressed dissatisfaction with his own work in the 1989 reissue of his study. On a related front, biographical studies of the author with a psychological focus have sought to shed potential light on examples of aberrant behavior in his fiction, with Gloria C. Erlich in Family Themes and Hawthorne’s Fiction (1984) raising the idea of Hawthorne’s possible physical abuse by his uncle, Robert Manning, and Philip Young in Hawthorne’s Secret (1984) pointing to the colonial history of incest in Hawthorne’s mother’s family, the Mannings, and suggesting the possibility of such intimacy between Hawthorne and his reclusive older sister Elizabeth. More recently, David Greven in The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud and the Politics of Gender (2012) combined Freudian and Lacanian insights with queer theory to critique Hawthorne’s representations of hegemonic manhood. Over the last few decades, Hawthorne’s writings have also been subject to a variety of ideological interventions that have threatened to diminish his status as an author. Only rarely do we find literary studies that, immune to critical fashion, substantially illuminate whole new swathes of the writer’s work. [End Page 816] With the appearance of David Diamond’s new psychoanalytic study of key factors of characterization in Hawthorne’s four major novels, Hawthorne criticism finally has an analysis that provides credible new psychological insights into key elements of the author’s four full-length romances. As a clinician who has spent decades teaching and overseeing the treatment of patients, Diamond brings his real-world experience to the realm of Hawthorne criticism with which he has long been engaged as reader and scholar. Diamond thus brings his psychoanalytic expertise to an interpretation of Hawthorne’s four major works of fiction, examining the characters of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Holgrave in The House of the Seven Gables, Zenobia in The Blithedale Romance, and Miriam in The Marble Faun. Largely eschewing professional jargon, Diamond frames his analyses with a basic paradigm of the psyche well suited to Hawthorne’s writings. As he explains in Chapter 1, Diamond takes as an interpretive model for his approach to Hawthorne’s fiction the early sketch “The Haunted Mind” (1835), postulating that the narrator’s late-night experience, between waking and dreaming, of the welling up of unconscious psychic materials provides a productive paradigm for a series of key scenes and characterizations in Hawthorne’s major fiction. As Hawthorne’s narrator writes, In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. (p. 306) Although the narrator goes on to denominate the upwelling of midnight phantoms in his mind as allegorical personifications of Passion, Feeling, Sorrow, Hope, Disappointment, Fatality, and Shame, Diamond interprets the experience as an episode of psychic disruption from the unconscious that offers the potential for personal transformation, both positive and negative. As he notes, [End Page 817] This confrontation with the unconscious is the site of a transformation which lies near each romance’s psychological, moral, and spiritual core. In addition, the figure of Death, the great teacher in all of Hawthorne’s romances...

COVID-19 risk perception framework of the public: an infodemic tool for future pandemics and epidemics

Understanding the risk perceptions of the public is central for risk communications and infodemic management during emergency and preparedness planning as people’s behavior depends on how they perceive the related risks. This qualitative study aimed to identify and describe factors related to COVID-19 risk perceptions of the public in Finland and to make this information readily available to those who communicate with the public during crises. The study is part of a larger project exploring crisis narratives through a mixed-methods approach. The study was based on a dataset of over 10,000 comments on the Facebook and Twitter posts of the Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare (THL) between March-May 2021. The data were analyzed qualitatively using thematic analysis. The study identified concepts linked with the pandemic risk perception that included knowledge, perceptions, personal experiences, trust, attitudes, and cultural values. The findings resulted in a framework of risk perceptions that can be used as taxonomy and a set of key concepts and keywords in social listening to monitor risk perception during future epidemics and pandemics.

Environmental Justice Pedagogies and Self-Efficacy for Climate Action

As institutions of knowledge and innovation, colleges and universities have a responsibility to prepare students to lead in a world impacted by climate change. While sustainability and climate change have been increasingly addressed on campuses, several aspects of typical climate change education, such as the use of fear appeals, and crisis narratives, have served to disempower and disengage students from the issue. Evidence suggests that incorporating justice-oriented concepts and pedagogies may help students build the skills and confidence to engage in complex social concerns. This qualitative study sought to understand the ways in which an undergraduate environmental justice course at the University of Michigan might contribute to students’ sense of self-efficacy for climate change action. Findings indicated that teaching from a justice perspective supported students’ understanding of root causes, the need for collective action, and their empathy for others. Self-efficacy for climate action was most apparent when students were (1) confident in a particular skill set and (2) when the scale of the problem matched their ability to address it. This supported prior evidence that environmental justice can serve as a critical pedagogical approach for encouraging engagement and empowerment in climate action.

Taking Political Time: Thinking Past the Emergency Timescapes of the New Climate Movements

This article discusses the contrasting “temporal regimes” of Extinction Rebellion and the concept of a feminist green new deal. The authors discuss the former's emphasis on emergency to stimulate disobedient action, particularly out of concern for one's future children and grandchildren. They argue that, while this emphasis has successfully catalyzed public agency, this agency remains socially narrow, as emergency thinking subordinates the political time central to inclusive movement building, while the personalization of intergenerational concern risks reproducing privilege and asset protection. As a result, actually existing material and symbolic inequalities are characteristically decentered. The authors contrast this with the timescapes of calls for a feminist green new deal, which eschew both crisis narratives and reprocentric futurism. In troubled times, they conclude, it is more productive to reconsider not just when but how to address the demands of climate breakdown.

The crisis discourse’s blind spot: EU-level politicization and the endogenization of the migration crisis

ABSTRACT The strong state-centric orientation of the EU crisis discourse has produced an important blind spot that limits our understanding of the Migration Crisis. Conceptually engaging with international migration studies and the politicization/identity nexus that postfunctionalism has put on the map in EU studies, this contribution advances original empirical evidence to visibilize the ongoing intra-EUropean struggle over the meaning of the crisis and the identity relationships underlying it. As the findings show, the externalizations the dominant crisis narrative promotes on the order dimension (vis-à-vis the EU) are clearly challenged by the European Commission as a politicizing agent: Along the EUropean identity markers ‘responsibility‘ and ‘solidarity‘, it has endogenized the Migration Crisis, located difference in the Member State-collective and consistently pursued integrative steps and the development of competencies. Taking into account this ‘crisis resolution‘ counter-narrative allows to enhance our understanding of the Migration Crisis and of the permanent contestedness of European (dis)integration.

Leaking the IPCC: A question of responsibility?

AbstractIn August 2021, while the world was grappling with the release of the IPCC WGI report, a group of activist scientists called Scientist Rebellion leaked parts of the Working Group III contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) prior to intergovernmental approval. Although Scientist Rebellion are not the first to leak an IPCC report, they are the most vocal leaker with a particular political agenda: to generate disruptive climate action by curtailing the carefully orchestrated intergovernmental process of the IPCC. I take this case of science in activism involving the IPCC interface as an example to examine the increasingly intricate relationship between science, activism and responsibility. The salient sense of urgency around climate action, the growing prevalence of the climate crisis narrative in both public and scientific spheres, and the increased policy‐relevance of science‐policy interfaces put strong pressures on (climate) scientists that need to be disentangled to be understood without premature judgment. I show that the leak is symptomatic of the novel responsibility to act(ivism) scientists are increasingly confronted with and I highlight some of the tensions that come with this responsibility. Emphasizing the centrality of the question of responsibility in, and of, science, I discuss the (ir)responsibility of leaking IPCC draft materials. I end on a call for more interdisciplinary attentiveness to the nexus of science, activism and responsibility and the cases in which they become entangled.This article is categorized under: The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Social Movements The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making

Neoliberal transformations after war: gendered narratives of post-conflict survival and crisis in Gulu district, northern Uganda

ABSTRACT The implementation of neoliberal reforms in northern Uganda was carried out in the context of armed conflicts in the years 1988–2006 and the post-conflict resettlement and reconstruction activities since 2006. This paper uses an intersectional gender analysis of the life histories of heads of the poorest households in Gulu district to document and examine the effects of neoliberalisation processes of appropriation and class formation in the context of extreme poverty in a post-war setting. It examines the gendered nature of the households’ experiences of survival, crisis, and vulnerability and analyses the effects of neoliberal policies on land, labour, livelihoods, and access to healthcare. The data evidences that the neoliberalisation of northern Uganda is compounding the dispossession of the poor, who were previously dispossessed by war. It underscores the fallacy of the ideology of ‘inclusive neoliberalism’ that informed the second phase of neoliberalisation in Uganda, into which northern Uganda was integrated. Gender proves to be a highly useful analytical lens through which to explore life histories.

Crisis Narratives and the African Paradox: African Informal Economies, COVID‐19 and the Decolonization of Social Policy

This article challenges the role of COVID-19 crisis narratives in shaping social policy choices in Africa. The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on Africa's vast informal economies, both as a symbol of the continent's intense vulnerability to the ravages of the pandemic, and as a puzzle in the face of the uneven and limited effects of COVID-19 across the continent. Indeed, an examination of statistical and documentary evidence reveals an inverse relationship between COVID-19 fatalities and the size of African informal economies, and a perverse relationship between best-practice COVID social protection responses and levels of COVID-19 mortality. Scrutinizing the evidence behind African COVID-19 crisis narratives raises questions about the ability of donor-led digitized social protection paradigms to address social needs in highly informalized, low-resource environments. This article highlights the role of crisis narratives as an exercise of power geared to remastering, homogenizing and reimagining African informal economies in ways that facilitate particular types of development intervention, sidelining alternative, more socially grounded policy perspectives. Through a closer examination of historical and contemporary realities in Africa's vast and varied informal economies, the article highlights the need to decolonize social policy by privileging local needs and policy perspectives over global policy agendas in the interest of transformative rather than palliative policy responses.

Crisis Narrative and Affective Intermediality: Figuring Disaster in Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf

Abstract Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (Le temps du loup, 2003) depicts a grim vision of the world in the aftermath of an unnamed catastrophe. Haneke turns the genre of dystopia into an experimental terrain where he can test the limits of the cinematic medium in the sense of “negating cinema in order to let reality speak for itself” (Nagib 2016, 147). An existential parable, Time of the Wolf envisions a sombre post-millenium age. It is a sharp analysis of what remains of man and society when the frame of civilization collapses. It scrutinizes the functioning mechanisms of the individual, the family and the social community in times of civilization undone. A harsh experiment towards a negative dialectics of the image, the film’s exceptionally austere cinematic language confronts the spectator with the aesthetics of the “unwatchable” (Baer et al., 2019) and “cinematic unpleasure” (Aston 2010). The paper explores the ways in which Haneke’s “intermedial realism” (Rowe 2017) also manifests in this film through photo-filmic images and painterly compositions, perceptions of stillness and motion, and cultural remnants of the past, giving way to affective sensations of intermediality.

COVID‐19 and the Meaning of Crisis

ABSTRACTCrisis is a concept that has a long history; it has come to denote moments of rupture and to foreground life and death decisions necessary for its resolution. The recent deployment of the concept in broad social, economic and political spheres has not only given rise to an industry of crisis management but has also established it as a framework through which to conceive, survive and reconstruct the world. The politics of crisis and the power of crisis narratives determine who is responsible for the crisis, who are its victims, who are its casualties and, inevitably, what policies need to be adopted and, later, institutionalized, in order to ‘fix’ the crisis and its outcomes. This article examines the politics of crisis narratives and situates the contributions to this Debate within larger debates on crisis under capitalism. These contributions employ the COVID‐19 experience as a lens to examine how moments of crisis allow economic and political elites to displace the blame for the crisis and its structural causes away from themselves and to institute policies which maintain the status quo, limit the scope for alternatives to emerge, and foreclose debates on fundamental questions of power relations which, inevitably, reproduce the conditions for future crises.

The Problem Space of Nature in Chongqing: A Conjunctural Analysis of Environmental Crisis Discourses and Local Housing Practices

Over the past decade, China’s centralized politics have explored new resources to tame the sustainability question and hinder the possibility for narratives of crisis to institutionalize foci of social and territorial malaise. The party-state rhetoric has focused its attention on inverse discourses of future environmental civilization whereas the current conjuncture shapes the local greenspace as a problem space. The analysis of environmental crisis discourses in Chongqing reveals the conundrum of redefining the commons in transitional times characterized by practices of redenomination of nature reserves and green objectifying high-end real estate advertisement. It points out how the crisis is turned into an opportunity for further uneven development through a process of emplacement on the basis of individualized forms of environmental protection. On the other hand, the digital makes space for alternative narratives of awareness which evoke a sense of social responsibility to understand the territorial changes and avoid a complete de-politicization of local communities on the governance of commons. The essay reveals how the state of tension within the eco-commodity production and circulation is linked to discourses of emotional proximity to the landscape.

Contesting the crisis narrative: epidemic accounts in Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Scientists and global commentators watched African countries closely in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, predicting an impending disaster: the virus was projected to overwhelm already weak health systems. These expectations were informed by imaginaries of Africa as an inevitable site of epidemic disaster. This paper draws on accounts from Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Democratic Republic of the Congo to contrast global catastrophe framings with everyday imaginations and experiences of crisis and crisis management. Utilising ethnographic research, the paper initially explores how COVID-19 was understood in relation to previous epidemics, from HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) to Ebola, as well as political conflict. It then considers how global crisis narratives both inform and are in tension with everyday collective and personal experiences. The paper brings these empirical reflections into a conversation with theoretical debates on the discursive construction of crisis and its effects, and argues that these tensions matter because crisis framings have consequences.

Reading Kazuo Ishiguro in Times of Crisis

ABSTRACT International crises are central to Kazuo Ishiguro's work. This introduction situates Ishiguro alongside contemporary global emergencies, including the COVD-19 pandemic, climate change, and reactions to emancipatory movements. It suggests that Ishiguro's work interrogates ‘crisis' by confronting his characters with both individual and collective crises, a theme explored in Catherine Charlwood's essay here. It shows how Ishiguro's work indirectly relates to the vast health crisis of COVID-19, which Sebastian Groes explores in his essay on empathy, (robot) ethics, digital well-being, and inequality. Connected to the pandemic, the introduction traces how Ishiguro's writing evidences growing concern for the climate crisis. The politics of migration are a key theme in Ishiguro: here Dominic Dean explores their longstanding and dangerous relationship with conspiracy theories, while Ivan Stacy, Melinda Dabis and Richard Robinson all connect Ishiguro to anxieties over resurgent nationalisms, cosmopolitan internationalisms, and complex transnationalisms. This introduction sets out how the essays in this Special Issue collectively explore the ethical difficulties in Ishiguro's crisis narratives, their refusals of easily satisfying resolutions, and their implicit critique of crisis frameworks for understanding political and historical problems. Sharply distinct from passivity or disinterest, Ishiguro’s work elicits an attitude of humility against apparently perpetual, end-dominated crises.

Globalization and Localization of Holocaust Memory


 
 
 Western media’s narrative of the current Ukrainian refugee crisis has revealed underpinnings of white supremacist ethnic values that fuel Western cosmopolitanism. Integrating globalized cases of war and genocide into local narratives allows for Western nations to condemn human rights abuses while ignoring their own histories of atrocities. In this paper I present the processes of globalization and localization of Holocaust memorialization as a case study by which to understand how Western, globalized nations engage in dialogue about human rights. I first illustrate the emergence of discourses surrounding memory, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, which gave rise to a global Holocaust memory in the West. I then outline how this global memory was adopted locally, resulting in the nationalization of Holocaust memorialization. I argue that a consequence of the localization of Holocaust memory is that it serves to subvert local memories of human rights abuses, ultimately keeping colonial institutions intact.
 
 

“They just won't listen”—The role of blame in narratives of past extreme weather events for anticipating future crisis

AbstractThe phase before an extreme weather event is crucial for the actual reaction to the impacts of such an event. In this phase, professionals in the field of civil protection and emergency management anticipate the intensity and impact of the event and use these expectations for action. We argue that anticipation is—beyond others—shaped by the organizations’ shared narratives of past crisis that resulted from extreme weather events. The findings focus on the frame of ‘blame’ in the narration and are based on two fields of study, road maintenance services and forest fire control. Qualitative group discussions and semistructured interviews show two very different views on blame depending on the organization: human factors and fate. This contrast can be traced back to the character of the weather events itself, but also with the self‐image of the organization and perceived external expectations. Depending on the narrative plot and threshold of the event, narratives can affect and alter practices of anticipation through narrations of renewal. Findings contribute to the understanding of organizational sensemaking through narratives of blame and consequences.

‘There were many problems even before Covid.’ Recurrent narratives of crisis in policies for migrants’ regularisation

ABSTRACT Exploring the case of the temporary regularisation for migrants promoted by Portugal in March 2020, this article problematises ‘recurrent narratives of crisis’. Narratives of crisis tend to depict migration as an exception and a violation of a supposed norm. Their recurrent use by politicians and media conveys the idea of a permanent state of emergency, allows the introduction of short-term measures, and drifts attention off the need for systemic changes. Regularisations have been used several times in European countries to manage migration ‘crises’. Yet, many scholars and activists have voiced doubts on their effectiveness, especially when regularisations only granted a temporary permit. In March 2020, Portugal acknowledged to foreign nationals with pending cases at the Foreigners and Frontiers Service (SEF) the possibility to be considered regular residents for the duration of the national state of emergency. The article sheds light on the discrepancy between the way this measure was presented by politicians and how it was received on the ground. Through new and timely evidence collected during this project, I build on the concept of ‘anti-crisis’ to advocate for a shift from crises narratives onto a more open discussion on systemic issues.

Narrating Crisis and Continuity in Migration Debates in the Visegrád States

Narrating Crisis and Continuity in Migration Debates in the Visegrád States

An Assortment of Meditations

An Assortment of Meditations

‘Healthy Publics’ and the pedagogy of It’s a Sin

The UK television series It’ s a Sin (2021) emerged alongside ongoing cultural projects that re-script acquired immunodeficiency syndrome crisis narratives and contribute to a broader ‘post-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome’ media culture. In this Cultural Commons piece, we consider how community health promoters have adapted the imagery from It’ s a Sin to create new human immunodeficiency virus educational materials. We situate these media practices in relation to an ongoing practice to think about the ‘end of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome’ through strategic health communication practices and question the cultural significance of adapting It’ s a Sin for health advocacy initiatives. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to the exchanges between popular culture and health promotion imagery. Critical health and media scholars should develop more complex cultural health criticism to capture the exchanges between health promotion and melodrama, to create accountability and avoid re-scripting normative perspectives of health and illness within post-acquired immunodeficiency syndrome media.