Interdisciplinary Symposium 1 | 22-24 May 2025 | UCD Humanities Institute
This interdisciplinary symposium analyzes the profound shift from the modern idea of crises as an exceptional state requiring urgent crisis management towards permacrises and polycrises as the ontological condition of a world at risk in the 21st century. To be sure: the evidence of a world entangled in poly- and permacrises is overwhelming: soaring energy and food prices; the erosion of democracy and the rise of political extremism the uncontrolled advancement of AI and cyber insecurity; the climate crisis and species extinction; large-scale involuntary migration in response to warfare and the climate change; biodiversity loss, the increase in natural disasters and extreme weather events are just some examples of cascading, connected and overwhelming crises.
Originally coined in the 1970s, the word polycrisis has gained currency for crises that ‘interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts’ (Tooze 2022). In today’s world crisis no longer designates a single problem that develops into an accelerating crisis, mobilizing urgent crisis management. Polycrisis captures complex and interacting processes with planetary consequences. In 2022 Collins Dictionary selected ‘permacrisis’ as word of the year. As David Shariatmadari has put it, ‘“Permacrisis” is a term that perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner.’ The accelerating climate crisis is both a perma- and polycrisis which unfolds with asymmetrical negative effects in the Global South.
Despite the growing awareness that we live in an age of perma- and polycrisis, to date most research has focused on the modern notion of crisis that emerged in Western Europe in the 18th century in the context of the temporalization of history (Koselleck 2006). The modern meaning of crisis as a tipping point that requires active crisis management emerged rather late in the history of the term. In ancient Greek, the verb ‘κρίνειν’ (krínein) means a) to separate and divide between two things or people or among a group of things or people, b) to enquire, investigate in a judicial sense, and c) the selection of the best. The noun ‘crisis’ derives from Greek ‘krino’ and means a decision, however, not in the modern sense.
After the French Revolution crisis became a criterion for what counts as history: without crises there is no discernible history and no historical narration. However, the episteme “crisis” is paradoxical: as the engine of a progressively developing modern history, crises testify, on the one hand, to the history making power of humankind and, on the other, to its limits because modern history is contingent. Crises therefore simultaneously mobilize and challenge human agency; they represent historical contingency and its mastery; they embody both normality and epochal change; they are predictable and unpredictable at the same time. Furthermore, because of the temporal urgency of crises, crisis discourse often delegitimizes criticism, even though both terms are intrinsically linked. As Janet Roitman argues in her book Anti-Crisis, crisis is a blind spot in the production of knowledge:
Crisis is claimed, but it remains a latency; it is never itself explained because it is necessarily further reduced to other elements, such as capitalism, economy, neoliberalism, finance, politics, culture, subjectivity. In that sense, crisis is not a condition to be observed (loss of meaning, alienation, faulty knowledge); it is an observation that produces meaning. More precisely, it is a distinction that secures a ‘world’ for observation. (Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis, Duke University Press, 2013, p. 39).
Faced with the epistemological legacy of western crisis discourse, our symposium aims to debate the shift from the modern understanding of crisis to perma- and polycrisis. We will ask: how does the age of perma/poly crisis reconfigure modern historical time? How does it relate to deep geological and other, non-European temporal modes and to the idea of multiple temporalities? How does the idea of perma/polycrisis transform the risk assessment strategies that are part and parcel of reflexive modernity (U. Beck)? Is it possible to imagine liveable futures which eschew the dystopian perspective of end-time scenarios? To what extent does the idea of permacrisis allow for the displacement or dismantling of the anthropocentric worldview which is a major cause of crisis in the Anthropocene? How and to what extent do perma/poly crises make room for modes of entanglement
that include non-human life forms and environments? What are the alternatives to the established crisis practice that turns the challenges of the Anthropocene into phenomena that can be identified, managed, and ultimately eliminated? How does the idea of perma/poly crisis affect civil society and democratic participation? How can we reconceive and promote the idea of the self not as a sovereign rational entity facing the world as Other but as a relational and interdependent being? How can we maintain and foster critical optimism in the age of perma/poly crisis? What kinds of affective relations can be engendered in relation to perma/polycrisis?
This is the first symposium in a series of three which will be rolled out in 2025/26. The three
symposia will result in peer-reviewed publications.
To address these and other issues we suggest a keywords approach to cover some of the following aspects. Perma/poly crisis and:
• affect/exhaustion/fear/happiness
• beginnings/middles/endings
• capitalism/finance
• civil society/participation in democracy/populism
• cruel optimism/happiness
• ethnicity/race
• gender/non-binary identities
• multiple temporalities/historicities
• non-human/more-than-human forms of life
• present/past/future
• risk/security/warfare
• things/objects/materialities
• subjectivity/selfhood/agency
• technologies/AI/transhumanism
• utopianism/catastrophes/extinction
Please send your abstract (150 words) to Prof Anne Fuchs (University College Dublin) and Prof Marek Tamm (Tallinn University) by 21 March 2025. Papers must not exceed 20 minutes to allow for ample discussion.
(opens in a new window)anne.fuchs@ucd.ie
(opens in a new window)marek.tamm@tlu.ee