Power in Crisis - HAL Research Conversations 2025

In recent years, former political leaders have characterised our world as being in a state of ‘permacrisis’, while historians have called our present situation a ‘polycrisis’ - a set of cascading emergencies that challenge the foundations of our societies.

This series of conversations across the disciplines in the School of Humanities & Languages seeks to interrogate the idea of crisis and the politics that emerge from the apparently incontrovertible assertion that we are in a time of unprecedented peril, politically, ecologically, socially, economically and more.

What is the language of crisis, and how does the discourse of danger shape our understanding of what is possible? Are diagnoses of proliferating crises motivating or paralysing?  What does the declaration of crisis do to our understanding of time, or to individual and collective conceptions of agency and identity? Does crisis, like the ancient Greek krisis, call for a judgment or decision or even a condemnation, and, if so, of whom or what? How have past emergencies exposed, reconfigured and undermined structures of power? Or, to borrow a question from a different moment of crisis, What is to be Done?

As we approach these questions, we encourage theoretical reflections, methodological experiments, cross-disciplinary explorations and research papers that engage with historical or contemporary case studies of power in crisis. 

This HAL research conversation will be conducted over a series of three two-hour hybrid workshops.
 

WORKSHOP SCHEDULE