Fall 2025 Theme: Crisis
The Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University (CSSD) welcomes proposals for new working groups to begin in Fall 2025. Proposals are due by April 7, 2025.
Crisis
From the recent Los Angeles fires and the gutting of US federal government programs to the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan, sweltering heat waves in Europe, and devastating typhoons in the Philippines, crisis appears ubiquitous today even if radically unequally experienced. Scholars have been probing and historicizing this crisis complex and its implications, and investigating how crises experiences are fractured along racial, class, gender, and other lines. Given the significance of crisis in the present, the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) at Columbia University seeks applications for interdisciplinary, faculty-led research working groups focused on crisis and inequality over the next two years. Various approaches are welcome, but may include crisis in relation to critical university studies, financialization and securitization, housing and migration, climate and catastrophe, ideo-warfare, and public health.
Long held to characterize an aberrant moment or turning point in which norms are questioned, truths revealed, and transformations become possible, ‘crisis’ is now an everyday state of affairs. Working groups applying to the call might critically interrogate contemporary and historical understandings of ‘crisis’ and which events or conditions get defined as crisis and why. This could include considerations of what fails to be registered as a crisis, such as slow and structural violence against marginalized populations. Groups might hone in on some of the political, economic, and social work that mobilizing ‘crisis’ does. This could range from how crisis enables emergency funding in austerity times and the fast-tracking of regulation without public deliberation to how it allows for the accumulation of profits from response and recovery initiatives under ‘disaster capitalism’ and engenders fear and reactionary politics.
Working groups can choose to take up a particular crisis such as Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath or more broadly the cost-of-living, housing, energy, or climate crises, considering their structural roots, systemic qualities, and experiential realities. Groups might hone in on the practices, institutions, and industries that have been put in place to manage and respond to crises and on shortcomings in crisis responses, which tend to be after the fact, short-term, and confounded by entrenched interests and investments. Working groups might branch out from crisis to consider related notions and practices like resilience, mitigation, and adaptation, among others.
In line with its mission, the Center is particularly interested in research that pays attention to how crisis is experienced unevenly by different social groups, how the lived experiences of crisis among impacted communities exceed official accounts, and how already vulnerable communities are made further vulnerable by crisis response and recovery efforts. For instance, working groups might take a class lens onto crisis, attending to how responsibility in crisis has been transferred onto individuals and is most acutely felt by the poor as public services are slashed in the name of efficiency, emergency services privatized, and insurance premiums raised. Resilience discourses might be probed for how they naturalize this transfer in responsibility, justifying and exacerbating abandonment by foregrounding community and self-reliance. Groups might choose to center race alternatively or as well, grappling with the ways in which structural racism and racial capitalism have generated institutional ecosystems that heighten vulnerabilities and drive environmental justice claims.
Annotated bibliography
In line with our thematic focus, we are so a peer-sourced annotated bibliography of interdisciplinary scholarship on crisis, with a particular eye on crisis and social difference/inequality. The bibliography aims to document existing conversations on crisis, assist researchers in locating scholarship relevant to their work, and expand crisis literature. It is a work in progress and is being developed through entries volunteered by scholars on references they consider seminal and think might be useful to others.
Adding to our annotated bibliography
Anyone can contribute to our annotated bibliography using the form below. To maintain coherence and unity, all entries will be processed by the Center for the Study of Social Difference team before being posted. Please make sure to use Chicago style formatting and to let us know if you would like to be added to our list of contributors to the bibliography or remain anonymous.
Example entry
Janet Roitman. Anti-Crisis. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014.
Historiography of crisis; financial crisis; theory; narrative
AnthropologyAnti-Crisis undertakes a diagnosis of crisis as an epistemic object and focuses on the effects that the judgement of crisis has. Building on Reinhardt Koselleck, Roitman traces how crisis as a historico-philosophical concept came to demarcate a turning point in history when an impasse is reached, truths revealed, norms questioned,and transformations seem possible. Inherent to the judgement of crisis has long been the judgement that something has gone wrong. Consequently, as Roitman suggests, assuming crisis apriori opens up critiques that end up affirming the social order by judging it as distorted from its right form rather than questioning and refuting how it came about to begin with. It leaves us stuck in a short-sighted “politics of crisis” that is not as revolutionary as might seem.
Looks at how the concept of crisis is applied in narrativizations of the 2008 financial crisis opening up and foreclosing explanations and solutions.