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Accepted Paper:
Polycrisis framings: media, temporalities, ethnographies
Birgit Bräuchler
(University of Copenhagen)
John Postill
(RMIT University)
We explore the different temporalities involved in the hybridly mediated construction and experience of global polycrises like Covid-19 or the Ukraine war
Paper Abstract:
In recent years, the notion of ‘polycrisis’ – a dynamic set of interconnected global crises such as Covid-19 or the Ukraine war – has gained traction in academia, the media and at global events like the World Economic Forum or the UN Climate Change Conference. Although there is a growing awareness that no major crisis can be analytically isolated from other such crises (Bures 2020), still largely missing from the scholarship is a media angle. As a result, we know very little about the role of media in the making of a polycrisis. The existing literature suggests that polycrises shape the way people use social media and that these media are increasingly used to frame and maintain them. In this paper, we explore media as instrumental tools for the production of crisis through the proliferation of narratives of polycrises that affect both those producing and those experiencing them. To this end, we look at two groups of people, drawing on two different kinds of ethnography: one about public figures who are key in creating, popularising and accelerating the polycrisis framing; and another that draws from existing (media) ethnographic studies of how specific groups of people experience the intersection of multiple crises in ‘hybrid media systems’ where old and new media interact (Chadwick 2017). We focus on the different temporalities involved in the hybridly mediated construction and experience of polycrisis.