Emergent Conversation 22

Edited by Katy Lindquist

Made in Crisis. Graffiti in Budapest. By Kristof Arndt. CC BY ND 2.0.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have been marked by a growing sense of uncertainty, crisis, and collapse. The global war on terror, the 2008 financial crisis, accelerating rates of climate change, massive wealth inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have shattered what was left of the illusion of modernity’s progress narrative. While the precarity of tomorrow is by no means a new phenomenon for many in the world, now those who were promised a position in the prosperity of modernity are contending with the possibility that their tomorrow is far from secure. Uncertainty has become the “structure of feeling” (Williams 1978) of the time.

This Emergent Conversations series engages with the growing literature on the politics of crisis. What is crisis and how should anthropologists contend with crisis as an ever-present category of society in today’s world? The contributions to this series explore the politics of crisis and question the assumptions underlying crisis time.