Amount Awarded: $25,000
A crisis is a moment in time when change and disruption radically challenge established practices and institutionalized visions of development and progress. At present, we are living through a global health crisis, accompanied by a looming financial crisis, and we are a long way from solving the climate crisis, the refugee crisis and a never-ending series of political crises, most recently the war in Ukraine. Although disruptive change is everywhere, our knowledge of what crises are and how they unfold in time and space is limited. Research has been hampered by the notion that crises are somehow rare, unusual, sudden, unexpected, almost unknowable. Against this, we want to reorient crisis research in two ways: firstly, to normalize crisis and put it at the centre of our understanding of changing human societies; secondly, to make crisis legible, transparent, durational, multifaceted and not least historical. We argue that in order to understand how crisis changes the world we live in, we need to conceptualize it as on-going and open-ended, as a disruptive change that invites us to reassess pasts, presents, and futures.