Theme for Proposals 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. 

Citations:
Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004. 

Evans, Brad and Julian Reid. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity, 2014. 

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.   

Grove, Kevin, Allain Barnett, and Savannah Cox. “Designing Justice: Race and the Limits of Recognition in Greater Miami Resilience Planning.” Geoforum 117 (2020): 134-143.  

Kaika, Maria. “Constructing Scarcity and Sensationalising Water Politics: 170 Days That Shook Athens.” Antipode 35, no. 5 (2003): 919-954. 

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007.

Koselleck, Reinhart. Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988.

Lakoff, Andrew, ed. Disaster and the Politics of Intervention. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.  

Lakoff, Andrew and Stephen Collier. The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2021. 

Loewenstein, Antony. Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe. New York: Verso Books, 2015.  
Masco, Joseph. “The Crisis in Crisis.” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (2017): S65-76.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. 

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. London: Zed Press, 1983.  

Rodríguez, Dylan. “Police Terror as Totality: Reformism and the Ensemble of Counterinsurgency.” In The Routledge History of Police Brutality in America, edited by Thomas Aiello, 485-496. New York: Routledge, 2023. 

Roitman, Janet. Anti-Crisis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 

Swyngedouw, Erik and Ilaria Giglioli. “Let's Drink to the Great Thirst! Water and the Politics of Fractured Techno-natures in Sicily.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32, no. 2 (2008): 392-414.