Coordinators

Maria Boletsi & Eva Fotiadi

Participants

Spiros Chairetis, Georgios-Evgenios Douliakas, Kristina Gedgaudaite, Christopher Jotischky, Katerina Kallivrousi, Amanda Kubic, Geli Mademli, Regina Mantanika, Carl Mauzy, Angeliki Mousiou, Eleni Papargyriou, Yiorgos Podaropoulos, Yiannis Stamos, Linda Xheza

Theme and programme of the research group

In the twenty-first century, crisis has become one of the defining terms of both scholarly inquiry and public discourse, mobilized to describe challenges at local and global scales. From the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, through the global financial crisis of 2007-08, the so-called refugee crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing wars and genocides, unfolding humanitarian and political emergencies, and accelerating environmental breakdown, crisis has come to describe not only exceptional events but a pervasive condition of contemporary life.

The convergence of multiple crises has given rise to what some scholars describe as polycrisis: a condition in which entangled crises amplify one another, producing effects that exceed the sum of their parts and resist clear causal distinction. The framework of crisis as an overwhelming, precarious mode of living—what Lauren Berlant has called “crisis ordinariness”—resonates with various sociopolitical shifts: the rhetoric of fear and othering, the so-called culture wars, post-truth politics and conspiracy cultures, the rise of authoritarianism, democratic erosion, widening inequalities, and geopolitical asymmetries between North and South. Positivist, rationalist, and techno-solutionist approaches to global challenges often fail to account for the uncertainty and disorientation that mark people’s experiences of an increasingly “weird” present. Our group examines contemporary crisis-scapes and the ways they are experienced, represented and contested, while exploring alternative concepts and imaginaries for navigating uncertain times.

Although an extensive body of scholarship on crisis and its various manifestations has emerged over the past two decades, crisis is frequently treated as a self-evident description of an event or condition. Instead, this group approaches crisis as a normative, multivalent, and historically variable concept: a framing that enables particular narratives of the present while foreclosing others. Similarly, while the term “polycrisis” has gained traction, we are attentive to critiques that it can risk projecting the present as historically unprecedented or functioning as an all-encompassing label that flattens differences across uneven, historically and geopolitically situated, experiences of crisis. We thus engage with polycrisis as a heuristic whose analytical purchase must remain open to scrutiny, while also exploring alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding and responding to our contemporary condition.

Historically, crisis has assumed multiple, often contradictory meanings. It has signified choice, decision, judgment, critique, illness, rupture and turning point, designating both objective states and subjective diagnoses. As a concept for understanding history itself, crisis has marked deviation from the normal, radical transformation, revolution, transition or chronic condition. While our group primarily focuses on contemporary crisis-scapes, we also investigate historical understandings of crisis and their enduring resonance.

While contemporary crisis rhetoric often constrains political imagination and minimizes dissent, crisis-scapes also generate new forms of critique and experimentation. Artists, writers, filmmakers, activists and communities have developed alternative languages, practices and imaginaries that resist crisis as a master narrative premised on judgments of failure (Roitman) and cultivate different ways of inhabiting damaged worlds and imagining collective futures. By examining the relationship between crisis and its cognate, critique, the group investigates how experiences of crisis can become sites of contestation, transformation and political imagination.

Questions the group addresses include:

• How do frameworks of crisis invoke particular visions of the past, produce experiences of time and imaginaries of futurity?
• How do they emplot the present?
• How do they shape public space and urban or rural environments?
• How do they configure subjectivity, responsibility and agency?
• How do they mobilize affects and emotions?
• How do alternative frameworks—emerging from speculative fiction, artistic experimentation, protest and activist practices—imagine a present of polycrisis differently?
• How can queer, weird, wild, monstrous and sensory-diverse imaginaries unsettle dominant crisis narratives and foster different modes of world-making?

Methodological questions are central to our pursuits. Contemporary conditions and experiences of (poly)crisis call for radical revising of our conceptual vocabularies and methods. Bringing together researchers from literary studies, art history, media and film studies, anthropology, ethnography, archaeology and political science, the group tries to develop conceptual and methodological tools for studying crisis in relation to temporality, futurity, hope, optimism, resilience, utopia, dystopia, weirdness, impasse and stagnation.

Envisaged results

The researchers in this group:

• Meet regularly in a reading group, provide feedback on each other’s work and discuss texts and material relevant to the group’s theme
• Organize lectures, seminars and workshops related to the group’s theme
• Work on individual and/or collaborative articles, edited volumes, special journal issues, book chapters, and other publications or projects
• Set up collaborations between humanities and social sciences scholars
• Set up collaborations with the artistic and cultural sector

Societal relevance

How crises are framed has pervasive consequences for political decision-making, public discourse, cultural production, the everyday lives of people as well as for the more-than-human world. Crisis narratives shape who and what is perceived as vulnerable, expendable, responsible, or complicit, while often declaring states of emergency that narrow the space for democratic debate and political alternatives. By critically examining crisis as a contested and historically variable concept rather than a self-evident condition, this group contributes to public debates on the ethical, political, and cultural implications of living in an age of polycrisis.

At the same time, the group explores how artistic practices, speculative fiction, and perspectives emerging from queer, weird, and sensory-diverse experiences challenge dominant crisis narratives and cultivate alternative aesthetic, epistemic, and political practices. We ask how crisis can become a site for critique, experimentation, and the development of new ways of understanding the present and imagining more just and sustainable futures.

The group’s societal relevance also lies in its commitment to interdisciplinary and publicly engaged research, working across the humanities and social sciences, and in dialogue with artists, cultural institutions, and social movements. We seek to develop critical tools for understanding contemporary crisis-scapes while contributing to conversations about democratic futures, social justice, and desirable ways of living on a damaged planet.

Relevant events and activities organized by group members

• SPUI25 event “Future Imaginaries in the Making: (Post-)Crisis Greece”

Organized by group members in collaboration with ‘Greek Studies Now’ network and NIAS. Amsterdam, 15 June 2022. Event on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbyOMFqqxLU

• International Conference Greek Studies Now: Local Cases, Global Debates

2^nd conference of Greek Studies Now (organized by group members in collaboration with “Greek Studies Now” network between Amsterdam and Oxford). University of Amsterdam, 15-17 June 2022. https://gc.fairead.net/2nd-conference-program

• From Crisis to Critique: Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-scapes

International Workshop, 4-5 March, 2021 (OSL/LUCAS, Leiden)

https://www.oslit.nl/osl-workshop-from-crisis-to-critique-languages-of-resistance-transformation-and-futurity-in-mediterranean-crisis-scapes/

• Perspectives on Futurity. Europe and the Global South.
  OSL Research Day, panel discussion, 8 October, 2021. (OSL/Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
  https://www.oslit.nl/osl-research-day-keynotes-andcall-for-panels/
• Urban Crisis-Scapes: On Walks and Ruins
  International workshop, 16-17 May, 2019 (ASCA/NICA)
  https://aihr.uva.nl/content/events/events/2019/ruins/ruins.html?origin=WwlfvMXFR%2F25v%2BlML%2FjsPA
• (Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique
   International Workshop, 17-18 October, 2019 (OSL/ ASCA)
  https://aihr.uva.nl/content/events/events/2019/10/untimely-crises.html

Relevant output by group members

• Boletsi, Maria, Florian Lippert and Dimitris Soudias. Special issue: New Normals, New Weirds: Cultures and Politics of (Ab)Normality. parallax 31.2 (2025). Introduction open access: https://doi.org/10.1080/1334645.2025.2638792
• Fotiadi, Eva (ed.). Exhibiting for Multiple Senses: Art and Curating for Sensory-Diverse Bodies. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2025.
• Boletsi, Maria and Dimitris Papanikolaou (eds.). Special issue: Greece and the South: Grammars of Comparison, Protest, and Futurity. Journal of Greek Media and Culture. 8.2 (October 2022). Introduction open access: https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00054_2
• Fotiadi, Eva. “Revisiting documenta 14's magazine South as a State of Mind: on “Southerness” in contemporary art and theory. Journal of Greek Media and Culture 8.2 (2022): 207–225. DOI https://doi.org/10.1386/jgmc_00058_1.
• Boletsi, Maria, Natashe Lemos Dekker, Kasia Mika, and Ksenia Robbe. (Un)timely Crises: Chronotopes and Critique. Palgrave Macmillan (2021)
• Fotiadi, Eva. “On the adventures of site-specificity. Maria Eichhorn’s Building as Unowned Property and Documenta 14 in Athens.” Field – A Journal of Social Engaged Art Criticism 18-19 (2021).
• Fotiadi, Eva. “The Promise of Public Art.” In Non-Catalogue. 61st International Film Festival Thessaloniki, 104-116. Thessaloniki, 2020 (in English and Greek).
• Boletsi, Maria, Janna Houwen and Liesbeth Minnaard (eds.). Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes: From Crisis to Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Introduction open access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-36415-1

This research group is active in the following constellations:

• Cultural and Social Critique
• Globalization and Migration
• Art & Aesthetics