Call for Papers | 'From Modern Crisis to Permacrisis and Polycrisis' | Interdisciplinary Symposium 2: Temporalities of permacrisis: pasts, presents, futures | Tallinn University, Estonia | 25–27 September 2025
Building on Reinhart Koselleck’s foundational work on crisis as a mode of temporalisation, this interdisciplinary symposium seeks to explore the conceptual, experiential, creative, and political dimensions of the transition from crisis as an exceptional state to permacrisis as a sustained condition of an entangled world. How does the notion of an “age of permacrisis” challenge modern historicity, particularly the linear articulation of past, present and future that has underpinned dominant historical and political narratives?
In a moment marked by ecological collapse, warfare, massive technological disruptions by AI and robotics, the rise of autocracy, a culture of disinformation, and a general erosion of democracy globally, we invite scholars, artists and practitioners to engage with and interrogate the new condition of permacrisis. Building on the first symposium in Dublin (22–24 May 2025), this second meeting will address specifically the following questions:
- How might we rethink crisis not as a moment of rupture to be resolved or overcome, but as a space of ongoing negotiation between human and more-than-human temporalities?
- Can the age of permacrisis become a point of departure for imagining open, plural, entangled and situated futures? How can we reimagine habitable and liveable futures for all, including human and more-than-human lifeforms?
- To what extent, and how, does the contemporary condition reconfigure our relationship to agency, subjecthood, and collective imaginaries?
- To what extent, and how, can different pasts be recovered through modes of wisdom as guides for liveable futures?
- In what way, and how, can we reconceive of the present, so that it is no longer merely a transition belt on the road to an ever more modern future?
- Can alternative temporal frameworks and speculative modes of thought provide avenues for resisting dystopian end-time narratives and the return of what Isabelle Stengers has called the “Coming of Barbarism”?
- How does the condition of permacrisis bring about a reconsideration of ethics, especially in relation to attention and care?
- What roles can and do the critical humanities play in fostering alternative approaches which are neither apocalyptic and dystopian nor technocratic and naively techno optimistic? How do contemporary art and narrative practices engage with permacrisis and the reconfiguration of temporality?
- Do the critical humanities necessarily have to become activist in times of permacrisis? What forms could this activism take? And if they do, what are the implications of this paradigm change?
We are particularly interested in contributions that question the anthropocentric assumptions of crisis discourse, and that explore how the idea of permacrisis might open onto more entangled, multiscalar, multispecies, or planetary perspectives. We welcome proposals from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to: cultural studies, philosophy, history, political theory, environmental humanities, anthropology, sociology, media and communication studies, art and design, science and technology studies, and feminist and decolonial theory.
Possible themes include (but are not limited to):
- Temporal regimes and the politics of crisis
- Crisis and the Anthropocene
- Non-linear, cyclical, or multiple temporalities
- Scale and scale critique as a way to grasp the temporality of crisis
- The aesthetics and media of permacrisis
- Futurity, hope, and open futures
- Multispecies entanglements and ecological time
- Dystopia, apocalypse and resistance
- Temporal imaginaries in art, literature and film
- Colonial and postcolonial timescapes
- Temporal affects: anxiety, exhaustion, anticipation
- Crisis as a hyperobject and its temporal undulations
- Attention and care in the condition of permacrisis
Submission details
Please send an abstract of no more than 150 words, along with a short biographical note (max. 100 words), to Prof. Marek Tamm (Tallinn University, (opens in a new window)marek.tamm@tlu.ee) and Prof. Anne Fuchs (University College Dublin, (opens in a new window)anne.fuchs@ucd.ie) by 31 July 2025. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes to allow ample time for discussion. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by mid-August.
We are committed to creating an inclusive and stimulating environment for critical exchange, and warmly encourage early career researchers, artists and practitioners to apply. The symposium will take place in person at Tallinn University.
Practical Information
The symposium is organised by the School of Humanities at Tallinn University, in partnership with the Humanities Institute at University College Dublin. It is the second in a series of three symposia to be held in 2025/26, which will lead to peer-reviewed publications.
Accommodation for all participants will be covered by the organisers. Travel costs, however, cannot be reimbursed. There is no participation fee.