Critical Explorations of Crisis: Politics, Precariousness, and Potentialities

On a daily basis, we are alarmed by crisis reports concerning hurricanes and floods, economic and financial uncertainties, political instability, armed conflict, desperate refugees and migrants, and outbreaks of aggressive global diseases. Most recently, the still-unfolding COVID-19 pandemic highlights how many of these perspectives are both discursively and materially woven together. COVID-19 has emerged not only as a public health crisis, but also as a myriad of other both global and more localised crises – from food shortages and deep-seated economic recessions, to breakdowns and ruptures in political regimes, social structures and collective mobility infrastructures for goods and people. As both governments and individuals continue to cope with and navigate these different issues, the pandemic underscores not only how experiences of crisis are often mutually reinforcing, but also how they serve to fuel and even amplify existing social and geopolitical asymmetries, with devastating effects for large parts of the world’s population.