On Crisis
Image credit: Jaber Jehad Badwan
Annotated bibliography
In light of the never ending crises we inhabit today, we have launched a new thematic focus on Crisis for 2025-2026.
This year’s Crisis-themed open call for interdisciplinary, faculty-led working groups resulted in the selection of Black Archipelago and the Crisis of Place, which explores how crisis and resilience are central to Black placemaking.
CSSD has partnered with the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Edmund W. Gordon Institute for Advanced Study to spearhead the development of a faculty-led working group focused on the university and crisis in response to recent developments in higher education and as a way to contextualize them through slow thinking.
CSSD has also initiated the yearlong program “Countering the Carceral State”, which investigates interconnections between the crises of disciplinary enforcement central to American power at home and abroad. Organized on the occasion of Malcolm X’s centennial and inspired by his internationalist insights, program events probe continuities between policing, racial profiling, and police militarization; the prison industrial complex; immigrant detention; forever wars in the Middle East and Central Asia; and the transformation of war zones like Gaza into technological testbeds.
Finally, CSSD has established a peer-sourced Annotated Bibliography to serve as a reference on scholarship on crisis, with a focus on its inequitable experiences, and as a resource for scholars interested in the topic. If you are interested in the topic of crisis, we encourage you to contribute sources to the bibliography below.
Building on our thematic focus, we are developing a peer-sourced annotated bibliography.
The annotated bibliography covers interdisciplinary scholarship on crisis, with a particular eye on the intersection of crisis and social difference/inequality. The bibliography, found below, aims to document existing conversations on crisis, assist researchers in locating scholarship relevant to their work, and facilitate the expansion of crisis literature. It is a work in progress and is being developed through entries volunteered by scholars on references that they consider seminal and that they think might be useful to others.
The Theme
From the recent Los Angeles fires and the gutting of US federal government programs to the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Sudan, sweltering heat waves in Europe, and devastating typhoons in the Philippines, crisis appears ubiquitous today even if radically unequally experienced. Scholars have been probing and historicizing this crisis complex and its implications, as well as investigating how crisis experiences are fractured along racial, class, gender, and other lines.
Long held to characterize an aberrant moment or turning point in which norms are questioned, truths revealed, and transformations become possible, ‘crisis’ is now an everyday state of affairs. To further define crisis, working groups focus on the political, economic, and social implications of mobilizing the concept of ‘crisis.’ This could range from how crisis enables emergency funding in austerity times and the fast-tracking of regulation without public deliberation to how it allows for the accumulation of profits from response and recovery initiatives under ‘disaster capitalism’ and engenders fear and reactionary politics.
In line with its mission, the Center is particularly interested in research that pays attention to how crisis is experienced unevenly by different social groups, how the lived experiences of crisis among impacted communities exceed official accounts, and how already vulnerable communities are made further vulnerable by crisis response and recovery efforts. Our working groups take a class lens to crisis, attending to how responsibility in crisis has been transferred onto individuals and is most acutely felt by the poor, as public services are slashed in the name of efficiency, emergency services are privatized, and insurance premiums are raised. Resilience discourses might be probed for how they naturalize this transfer in responsibility, justifying and exacerbating abandonment by foregrounding community and self-reliance. Groups center on race as well, grappling with how structural racism and racial capitalism have generated institutional ecosystems that heighten vulnerabilities and drive environmental justice claims.