Call for Papers | 'From Modern Crisis to Permacrisis and Polycrisis' | Symposium 22-24 May 2025
This call for papers is for 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.
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.
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?
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
Submission deadline: 21 March 2025. Please send your abstract (150 words) to:
- Prof. Anne Fuchs (University College Dublin): (opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)anne.fuchs@ucd.ie
- Prof. Marek Tamm (Tallinn University) (opens in a new window)(opens in a new window)marek.tamm@tlu.ee
Papers must not exceed 20 minutes to allow for ample discussion.
- Further project details available HERE