Notion Of Crisis Research Articles

Crisis as war: undocumented migration and the Greek nation under threat

ABSTRACT The paper examines the interconnections between crisis, war and undocumented migration focusing on the crisis at Evros borderzone, Northeastern Greece, in February/March 2020. It puts forward an analysis of public discourse that posits Greece as “a nation under threat” and reflects on the notion of crisis both as a dimension of the present historical moment and a governmental device for strengthening state power. The paper suggests that crisis and war be understood as parts of a security continuum and that the Evros crisis of 2020 rendered visible the mutual constitution of the processes of illegalization and securitization of migration. Formulated as an open threat for Greece and Europe, undocumented mobility feeds into the (in)security spiral promoting more surveillance, tighter border control and deepening the social hierarchy that positions illegal(ized) migrants at the lowest social strata.

The Two Sides of Experienced Crisis: Enabling and Preventing Coping Strategies During COVID-19 Pandemic

This article conceptualises Covid-19 pandemic though the notion of crisis in an attempt to explain how the two different sides of this crisis can prevent or enable coping strategies to emerge and be employed. For this endeavour to be accomplished, this study utilised selected fragments deriving from a larger sample of 46 in-depth interviews with Greek participants (born and raised in Greece) during the April 2020 first lockdown, residing in 23 cities worldwide1. This article argues that shared experiences among participants, entail meaning making of the pandemic in terms of a) a fearful crisis through vulnerability and failure as well as b) a hopeful opportunity of improvement through coping strategies. Despite the fatal aftermath of this global crisis, most people have managed to survive it and some of them have even managed to excel through it. Ultimately, portraying crisis as opportunity rather than fear enabled participants to concentrate on means employed to cope with this pandemic.

Keeping the “public machinery” running: notions of crisis and efficiency in the administration of waiting by the National Committee for Refugees (CONARE)

Keeping the “public machinery” running: notions of crisis and efficiency in the administration of waiting by the National Committee for Refugees (CONARE)

Fast, slow, ongoing: Female academics' experiences of time and change during COVID‐19

AbstractThis paper reports on an investigation into female academics' experiences of living and working through the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United Kingdom (UK). A diary, diary‐interview method (DDIM) was used to gather qualitative data from 25 participants about their lives during the period March 2020–September 2021 and diary and interview data have since been curated and published in an open access digital archive. The paper argues firstly that in recording and interpreting change over time in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic, the methodology constitutes a qualitative longitudinal research (QLLR) approach. Secondly, that the method has the capacity to convey temporal disruption and complexity, aligned with notions of crisis as fast, slow and ongoing. Thirdly, that Nixon's theorising of ‘slow violence’ can be used to frame the impacts of the pandemic as gradual, unseen and banal despite potentially negative implications for female academics' career progression. Finally, the paper argues that gathering this data through DDIM and publishing it in a publicly accessible digital archive represents a necessary form of witness with the potential to be utilised for future interventions.

Crisis as potential for collective action: Violence and humanitarianism on the Polish‐Ukrainian border

The notion of crisis has evolved from a sudden, acute event to a broader disruption of stable historical narratives and the future. This article explores how the crisis surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine challenged the inevitability of Poland's membership in the West and threatened to catapult it back into a history of war and Russian domination. However, for Polish volunteers aiding Ukrainian refugees and the military, the crisis was also a temporality in which their actions took on outsize importance. By working on seemingly mundane tasks of provisioning and transport, they attempted to shape history and, in doing so, redefined the concept of humanitarianism in times of crisis. This article highlights how crisis can serve as a potential for collective action, blurring the distinction between individual and collective agency and redefining how people respond to crises.

The two sides of Experienced Crisis: Enabling and preventing Coping strategies during Covid-19 Pandemic

This article conceptualises Covid-19 pandemic though the notion of crisis in an attempt to explain how the two different sides of this crisis can prevent or enable coping strategies to emerge and be employed. For this endeavour to be accomplished, this study utilised selected fragments deriving from a larger sample of 46 in-depth interviews with Greek participants (born and raised in Greece) during the April 2020 first lockdown, residing in 23 cities worldwide. This article argues that shared experiences among participants, entail meaning making of the pandemic in terms of a) a fearful crisis through vulnerability and failure as well as b) a hopeful opportunity of improvement through coping strategies. Despite the fatal aftermath of this global crisis, most people have managed to survive it and some of them have even managed to excel through it. Ultimately, portraying crisis as opportunity rather than fear enabled participants to concentrate on means employed to cope with this pandemic.

Speaking of a ‘climate crisis’: Fridays for Future's attempts to reframe climate change

The paper explores how the Fridays for Future movement (FfF) attempts to reframe climate change as a climate crisis. Adding to the research on the role of climate change communication for inducing behavioural change, we analyse the way in which this reframing is conducted and locally negotiated by FfF groups in Germany and Estonia. The paper thus focuses on the question of how FfF’s global blueprint for a climate strike, which builds on the notion of crisis, is transferred into different societal contexts. Aided by multisite ethnographies, similarities and differences in reframing and protest strategies and the negotiation of the local reception of this message are elaborated by referencing the example of FfF groups in Berlin and Frankfurt (Germany), as well as Tallinn, Tartu and Pärnu (Estonia).

Theory after Practice

Theory after Practice

Медицински конотации в понятието „криза“

This paper attempts to show how medical terminology and medical connotations mark concepts that later become central to philosophical, cultural, political, and social discourse. In this case, the chosen concept is the notion of crisis, which has been central to medicine since antiquity, has marked with meanings all subsequent epochs, and has become significant for our entire modernity. In short, it shows how medical connotations carry over to unrestricted uses in the broader context of language, and the concept of crisis is open to uses of different orders and in diverse contexts. To arrive at the conviction that its use as a metaphor for states of decline, failure, degeneration, ruin prevails. It is said to be a crisis, but as in medicine, it refers to deterioration.

Covid-19: Towards a New Notion of Crisis

Covid-19: Towards a New Notion of Crisis

“Pedir un café puede costarte la vida”: phobias of democracy in Álex de la Iglesia’s El bar

ABSTRACT The so-called Spanish transition to democracy has largely been a process of collective forgetting undertaken for the sake of progress and measured by the country’s perceived success at democratization, for example, by adopting a new constitution and joining the European Union after forty years of a repressive fascist dictatorship. As the 15-M movement took off in 2011, the effectiveness of the Transition started to be openly questioned. In the 2017 film El bar, directed and co-written by Álex de la Iglesia, the characters find themselves in a situation that appears to be a random terrorist killing as one of the characters walks out of a bar in Madrid. Implying that we live in a society where “pedir un café puede costarte la vida”, the film employs a rather predictable narrative trope of trapping a handful of characters from different walks of life in an enclosed space and shows the audience how they organize themselves into a community whose goal is to leave the trap as a community, thus questioning its functionality. This article examines the plethora of fears that circulate in democratic Spain including terrorism, disease and Balkanization through a cinematic lens that seeks to reevaluate the Transition process and the very notion of crisis that shapes the public sphere and is, in turn, shaped by it.

Learning from precarity

Abstract The arts sector was in a precarious state long before covid-19 broke out. Job insecurity, low or no wages, fluctuating funding and alternating government attitudes towards the sector have caused artists to get used to living in a constant state of precarity. Therefore, this essay will explore what precarity, crisis and imagination mean for the arts sector. It will examine to what extent these notions, intrinsically connected with the sector itself, are capable of producing change for the sector — and for society as a whole. Starting with a reflection on the three notions of crisis, precarity, and imagination in relation to the current state of the arts sector, this essay will argue why they might be the ingredients of a ‘perfect storm’. A perfect storm consisting of all the necessary elements that could produce a lasting institutional change in the arts sector. Next, this essay will delve into the precarious state of the arts and the artist in two neighbouring countries: Belgium – and more specifically Flanders – and the Netherlands. This essay will look at the social, cultural, and political differences between the Netherlands and Flanders in how they value and fund the arts and how they handle relief funds for the arts sector during the corona crisis by examining the immediate responses to the crisis in a time frame from March until July 2020. Finally, this essay will examine whether the current crisis – and subsequent ‘perfect storm’ – can revive the debate on a basic income, and argue why the arts sector is an ideal place to experiment with this.

Towards an Ethnography of Crisis

This article analyses the challenges posed by carrying out ethnography with migrants experiencing mental distress and living in conditions of multiple marginality (social and existential). Drawing on the notion of crisis, I consider the experience of disorder as an ethnographic object reflecting the intersection between the individual and the collective. This article examines how ethnographic practice can be applied to, and is altered by, the study of these experiences, asking: How are we, especially as first-time fieldworkers, affected by unsettling encounters? How do we react and respond to the crises of others? What use can we make of our own experiences of crises by developing new ways of practising fieldwork?

Viral Times

Viral Times

«Духовный кризис» начала ХХ в.: от философских к религиозным интерпретациям

The paper is an attempt to narrow down the notion of spiritual crisis which is now widely applied in research on history of culture of the 19th–20th centuries, with respect to history of German philosophy and observation of modern reli­giosity. The shift from the history of philosophy to the religious context is ful­filled through analysis of texts of two religious thinkers, A. Reinach and S. Frank, whose thought clearly demonstrates strong interconnection between the both fields. Analysis of contemporary studies on history of phenomenological philos­ophy (C. Möckel and W. Gleixner) lets firstly observe ways of application of Koselleck’s notion of crisis to investigations in the history of philosophy. Sec­ondly it discovers two possibilities of philosophical contextualization of the con­cept of spiritual crisis – on the one hand, as a constituent rhetorical element of the philosophical statement (Möckel), on the other hand, as a term which de­scribes the uniqueness of an intellectual situation of the beginning of the 20thcentury (Gleixner). Then these aspects of the rhetoric of crisis are applied to reli­gious philosophy of Reinach and Frank, what leads to interpretation of their works as a particular statement discovering the divine (or the holy) as a new cat­egory of religious consciousness.

On tackling the environmental crisis through human rights

There is broad scientific consensus on the anthropogenic roots of the environmental crisis, whether we think about biodiversity decline, climate change, pollution or, in general, about the increasing scarcity of ecological space for living entities. Unlike humans, other living beings have no notion of crisis and are probably not bothered by such highly abstract concerns. When a crisis occurs, non-humans either adapt or vanish, whereas humans may see it lurking ahead and become anxious. This human urge to reflect on the state of nature and the role of humanity is manifest in the new concept of the Anthropocene. Originally, human rights and environmental crisis entered the public sphere as separate themes but from the 1970s, they began to appear together on a regular basis in legal and political documents and in research literature. Philosophically, the ultimate question is whether we humans are to blame ourselves for the environmental crisis because of the rights that we grant to ourselves. In other words, are human rights, above all, a source of the environmental crisis or an essential element in the search for solutions? In this article, this quandary is approached philosophically from the belief that the framework of human rights might help us envisage a civilised way out of the crisis.

From omniscient narrator to involved participants: Places and spaces “activated” in the EHEC O104:H4 crisis 2011

Crisis management is often conceived from the position of an omniscient narrator, albeit the general consensus that crises are subjectively interpreted and experienced. The paper makes an analytical attempt to de‐homogenize the notion of crisis. We argue that the perception of crises differs and present a spatial perspective on crisis to foreground the positionality of different actor groups. By referring to the EHEC outbreak 2011 in Germany, we explore two spatial configurations that seem to be of particular relevance: territories embedded in a nested hierarchy and topologies of interconnected places. State authorities think and act strongly in terms of territorial borders and along sectoral boundaries. From their point of view, the crisis tends to be threatening due to its “transboundary" character. Medical experts, in contrast, coped with the crisis in trans‐local networks of colleagues. For this group, the crisis was also an opportunity to substantially enhance professional knowledge.

From Corona Virus to Corona Crisis: The Value of An Analytical and Geographical Understanding of Crisis.

The term ‘crisis’ is omnipresent. The current corona virus pandemic is perceived as the most recent example. However, the notion of crisis is increasingly deployed as a signifier of relevance, rather than as an analytical concept. Moreover, human geography has so far little contributed to the interdisciplinary crisis research field which is fixated on the temporal aspects of crisis but neglects its spatiality. Against this background, the first aim of the paper is to demonstrate the value of thinking about crisis analytically. Therefore, we introduce theoretical knowledge developed within a recently emerging literature on crisis management. Second, we demonstrate the relevance of including geographical thinking into crisis research more systematically. Based on the TPSN‐framework by Jessop et al., we illustrate spatial dimensions of the ‘corona crisis’, its perception and handling in Germany. The empirical references are based on media reports.

Soviet official critiques of the resource scarcity prediction by limits to growth report: the case of Evgenii Fedorov’s ecological crisis rhetoric

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on official Soviet attitudes towards ‘ecological crisis’ and the rhetoric developed to address it. It analyses in particular the discussions in the Soviet Union that followed the publication of the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth (1972). It contributes to the better understanding of the debate around resource scarcity in a framework of so-called ‘ecological crisis’ as it was conceptualized in the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. It is based on the analysis of writings by the Soviet geophysicist Evgenii Fedorov (1910–81) who was among the few Soviet members of the Club of Rome and thus had direct access to contemporary Western scholarship. The paper explores how such rhetoric accepted and reconceptualized the notion of crisis for use in both domestic and international environmental politics and the associated advancement of technology as the most effective remedy against resource scarcity. Fedorov largely built his ideas on Soviet Marxism and Vladimir Vernadsky’s concepts, which preceded the current notion of the Anthropocene. In addition, his experience in nuclear projects and weather modification research –– both more or less successful technocratic projects – gave him some kind of assurance of the power of technology. The paper also provides some comparison of the views of the problem from the other side of the Iron Curtain through a discussion of the thoughts of the left-wing American environmentalist Barry Commoner (1917–2012), which had been popularized for the Soviet public by Fedorov.

Machinery of Male Violence: Embodied Properties and Chronic Crisis amongst Partners in Vietnam

This article takes the notion of crisis as a helpful analytical entry point to unfold the tem- poralities and modalities of the machinery of violence as manifested in men’s abuse of their female partners in Vietnam. Based on ethnographic research I conducted over the years, the article argues that some types of crises might be episodic, and thus a bracketing of daily life, while others, such as intimate partner violence, might settle as a crisis of chronicity; as a condition of prolonged difficulties and pain that surreptitiously becomes a new ‘normal’. The machinery of violence, the article shows, refers to processes of symbolic and material transformations of a targeted woman, shaped in accordance with a perpetra- tor’s essentialist imaginations about her embodied properties (e.g., gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and bodyableness). Such violence is invigorated by a patrilineal organization of society and a systemic permissiveness to male-to-female abuse. A battered woman is con- fined to an interregnum; a space in which the laws of protection do not apply and male violence is perpetrated with impunity. Yet, men’s violence against their female partners also is combatted and resisted in Vietnamese society.