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Short abstract

I extend crisis to its organisational corollary: the project. I then argue that governance through serial exceptionalisation renders politics unstable and makes invisible structural transformations to economic intervention. Returning to normal is not enough—we need a new normal.

Long abstract

Crisis has long been part of European economic governance. Under the Hayekian conceptualization of EU law, markets are ‘encased’ in legal protections shielding them from public reproach. Until they are not. Crisis-infused special state subsidy guidelines operate as recurring suspensions of normal rules, enabling market incursions and governance rearrangements otherwise legally precluded. They are palatable because they are ultimately temporary. They promise a return to ‘normal’. Borrowing from Esposito, I argue that accepting crisis as ‘crisis’ entrenches the blindness she speaks of, reinforcing encasement and foreclosing inquiry into alternative forms of intervention.

I extend this critique to the organizational corollary of the crisis—the project. Like crises, projects denote a temporal boundedness, a promise that things will return to normal. Important Projects of Common European Interest (IPCEIs) exemplify this logic. They perforate the European governance architecture not despite but because of their exceptionality, centralizing actors around a central node buoyed by the promise of an end. Rather than treating them as correctable governance failures by extending project horizons or reforming investment instruments, I ask what the project form renders systematically invisible: non-exceptional, routinized, and democratically accountable public investment.

I propose reading the crisis-project dyad not as a mechanism to manage emergencies, but as a ritual of recurring affirmation of a Hayekian fiction which precludes its structural transformation. The promise of redemption—of a return to normal—is not a solution to the EU’s problems. It is the problem.

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Short abstract

This paper traces the emergence of “crisis” as a key category of modernity in the French Enlightenment. Through Rousseau, Diderot, and the Encyclopédie, it shows how crisis became a mode of interpreting the present, shaping modern political temporality and informing contemporary discourses.

Long abstract

This paper explores the emergence of “crisis” as a central category of modern historical and political experience through a genealogy grounded in the French Enlightenment. While Reinhart Koselleck identified the late eighteenth century as a Sattelzeit in which key political concepts were fundamentally reconfigured, the specific role played by Enlightenment debates in transforming crisis into a privileged mode of interpreting the present has received comparatively limited attention.

Focusing on Rousseau, Diderot, and the intellectual milieu of the Encyclopédie, the paper argues that crisis ceased to designate merely an exceptional moment of rupture and became instead a form of observation. Enlightenment diagnoses of moral corruption, political decay, transformations of sociability, and colonial violence increasingly framed the present as a decisive threshold requiring judgment and intervention. In this context, crisis emerged at the intersection of critique and temporality: it allowed thinkers to interpret historical change as both symptom and turning point, thereby reconfiguring the relationship between experience and expectation characteristic of modern historical time.

Drawing on conceptual history and STS approaches to performativity and epistemic infrastructures, the paper suggests that contemporary invocations of permanent crisis—economic, political, or cultural—should be understood not as unprecedented conditions but as the continuation of an epistemic regime consolidated during the Enlightenment. Recovering this genealogy enables a critical reassessment of crisis discourse today and invites reflection on what forms of political imagination become obscured when the present is primarily understood through narratives of emergency and resolution.

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Short abstract

Traces how the rise of “wicked problems” and related terms in the 1970s reframed crisis as inherently unknowable and unsolvable, producing neoliberal subjects attuned to uncertainty, permanent insecurity, and the normalization of perpetual crisis.

Long abstract

This talk focuses on the 1970s as a historical moment in which new vocabulary for describing social and political crisis emerged across disciplines including design, economics, management theory, and cybernetics. Whether labeled wicked, wooly, messy, muddy, ill-defined, tricky, or divergent, this new classification of problems signaled the decline of Cold War rationality. The technocratic promise that crises could be diagnosed and solved gave way to a growing conviction that the most pressing problems of the time were resistant to rationalization and technically unsolvable.

By situating this linguistic shift within its broader political and cultural contexts, the paper asks what kind of subjectivity this new problem vocabulary produced. Focusing on the career of the term “wicked”—now paradigmatic in contemporary design and architectural practice, yet circulating far beyond these fields—I examine what forms of perception and intervention it enabled and foreclosed. I argue that wickedness reframed crisis as ontologically indeterminate, structurally unresolvable, and epistemically opaque. Coinciding with the rise of neoliberalism, this framing rendered moderate and instinct-driven approaches sensible and responsible, since definitive knowledge was presumed impossible. Simultaneously, it invisibilized cases in which structural causes were empirically well understood, deflecting systemic critique through appeals to falsificationism and bounded rationality.

I suggest that this historical moment produced a subject constituted by existential vulnerability and normalized insecurity. Revisiting the genealogy of wicked problems thus allows us to interrogate crisis not as an exceptional event, but as a mode of observation that organizes political possibility and continues to shape our contemporary moment.

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Short abstract

This study explores comfort-seeking as a socio-technical response to uncertainty. Comparing Victorian domestic retreats with contemporary “feel-good” digital content, it examines how platform architectures shape everyday practices of emotional refuge during periods widely narrated as crisis.

Long abstract

Can comfort neutralise uncertainty? Do we hide behind “feel-good content” much like Victorians retreated into domestic interiors during periods of rapid social change? What is the significance of comfort in turbulent times?

Rather than treating crisis solely as an objective historical condition, this research approaches it as a cultural and epistemic frame through which uncertainty is interpreted and managed in everyday life. It examines comfort-seeking as a recurring socio-technical practice activated during periods widely narrated as moments of disruption or upheaval. Drawing on historical accounts of Victorian pragmatic comforts (Crowley, 1999) and the emergence of “domestic bliss” (Sassatelli, 2007), the paper connects these earlier practices to contemporary forms of digital comfort, including the circulation of online “feel-good” content.

Just as nineteenth- and twentieth-century transformations — industrialisation, world wars, and economic upheaval — generated renewed attention to safety, domesticity, and emotional refuge, contemporary societies increasingly describe the present as a condition of “polycrisis.” Within this discursive environment, consumers turn to accessible pleasures and moments of emotional respite, from everyday “little treats” (WGSN, 2025) to uplifting short-form videos on social media.

Combining historical analysis with qualitative content analysis of short videos identified as “feel-good” by participants, this study argues that contemporary digital comfort — from cottagecore aesthetics and “digital hygge” (Barbour & Heise, 2019) to “anti-brainrot” content — represents a patterned cultural response to uncertainty rather than simple escapism. These practices unfold within platform architectures where algorithms and recommendation systems curate affective environments while simultaneously commodifying comfort within attention economies.

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Short abstract

Examining the media systems that shape the social construction of crises, this paper employs a mixed-methods approach to explore how plastics pollution is communicatively framed as an urgent problem, what systemic (in)visibilities that framing produces, and what political responses it invites.

Long abstract

Plastic pollution is a stubborn and intensifying environmental concern, oft-characterized as a crisis - such as in the United Nations’ Triple Planetary Crisis framework. Yet framing plastic pollution as a crisis requiring a remedy (cf. Esposito 2017; Patterson et al. 2021) limits our historical and political awareness of the systemic (but not inexorable) nature of the problem. In this paper, I explore how plastic pollution is communicated as a crisis within news media discourses, what this framing makes (in)visible, and what role changing media infrastructures play in bringing about new political dynamics around plastic pollution as a socio-ecological problem. The paper traces the history of plastics from the post-war boom in plastics production to the present day, chronicling their material impacts and corresponding societal understandings. It combines structural topic modeling, a computational method able to tackle large-scale historical corpora, with discourse analysis (Aranda et al. 2021). I outline how plastics have been communicated in news media discourses, taking media infrastructures as a key system in which the plastics crisis is constructed. Although frequently overlooked, media infrastructures form the communicative sociotechnical assemblages that condition how environmental crises come to be culturally and politically understood (Couldry and Hepp 2017). With this focus, I explore what kinds of problem constructions are encouraged by contemporary media infrastructures, and whether framing plastic pollution as an urgent crisis usefully mobilizes crisis management strategies, or rather hides a toxic normalcy from view - a normalcy thereby reproduced.

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Short abstract

Focusing on the early response to Covid-19 in New Zealand, I argue that Rancière’s "distribution of the sensible" is particularly useful for examining crises, but does not go far enough in assisting us in understanding the experiential dimensions of social turmoil.

Long abstract

Social science examinations of crisis have been dominated by critiques of crisis rhetorics as ploys to extend State power (often inspired by the work of Giorgio Agamben). But crises have sensory dimensions that impact both people’s lived experiences and their engagement in the political. Employing but also modifying Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible” elucidates these dimensions and reveals their political import. Rancière’s emphasis on the nexus between sensory experience, knowledge, and the political as well as his insistence on the plurality of “distributions of the sensible,” enables us to more closely examine the interplay between State discourses and public perspectives during states of emergency and. Drawing on the example of the COVID-19 pandemic in Aotearoa/NZ, I examine how, even during a relatively contracted time frame, various distributions of the sensible can come into being not only between social groups, but also (contra Rancière), within communities or even within individuals. A broader conceptualization of how sensory-political-knowledge regimes emerge, gain or lose traction, and conflict with one another enables insight, I suggest, into how and why some occasions in history are experienced as times of chaos, unmooring, or feeling off balance and thus, yields a better understanding of the co-production of public and State framings of these events.

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Short abstract

Solving the antibiotic innovation crisis is has become the preoccupation of various actors. The paper investigates how the ‘crisification’ of antibiotic innovation was used to prompt policy change, justify public funding and revive a stagnating biotech sector.

Long abstract

Antimicrobial drug resistance (AMR) in conjunction with a significant ‘innovation drought’ in the pharmaceutical sector is broadly recognized as a pertinent global antibiotic innovation crisis.

This crisis has materialized through multiple paradoxes and morbid symptoms, including the (re-)emergence of highly lethal bacteria, bankruptcies of ‘successful’ companies, a massive brain drain away from antibiotic research, and industry and policy initiatives as ‘bridging solutions’ that seek to buy time rather than addressing the systemic roots of the crisis. Yet little attention has been paid to how this crisis narrative itself reshapes pharmaceutical policy and industry dynamics.

Solving this innovation crisis is seen as essential to mitigating AMR and has become the preoccupation of a whole array of different actors and stakeholders who are problematizing the crisis in terms of an interregnum, where potential solutions on the horizon are recognized as viable and effective, yet politically contested and thus cannot be (yet) borne.

This paper draws on extant STS accounts of pharmaceutical crisis to carefully delineate how AMR created both a specific crisis and an opportunity for the (European) biotech sector and its (re-)emerging innovation ecosystem. Based on ethnographic immersion in the field as part of the ERC project ALTERBIOTIC, this paper investigates how the ‘crisification’ of innovation was mobilized to prompt pro-industry policy change, justify public subsidy and channel private investment, and revive a stagnating biotech sector.

Doing so, it critically investigates how strategic uses and articulations of ‘crisis’ reproduce vested interests and lock in specific future pathways.

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Short abstract

We examine the emergence of a neofascist mode of governance in contemporary Ecuador through the analytical lens of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on sovereignty, violence, and the tradition of the oppressed. We show how the state of exception has been turned into a permanent technology of rule.

Long abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a neofascist mode of governance in contemporary Ecuador through the analytical lens of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on sovereignty, violence, and the tradition of the oppressed. Drawing on Benjamin’s insight that “The ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule” (Benjamin [1942] 2024: 32), we argue that the government of Daniel Noboa has transformed the state of exception from a temporary juridical measure into a permanent technology of rule. The sovereign's exceptional decision paradoxically becomes a new everyday reality, producing a political order where illegality becomes governmental method rather than deviation. This normalization of emergency powers is intertwined with racialized state violence, the aestheticization of political authority, and the consolidation of oligarchic colonial power structures.

We situate Ecuador’s current crisis within broader Latin American histories of “preventive counterrevolution,” (Fernandes, 1982) showing how the invocation of a crisis triggered by “narcoterrorism” functions as a discursive apparatus to criminalize dissent and dismantle autonomous popular organization. At the same time, we highlight the emergence of what Benjamin calls the “true state of exception” (Benjamin 2024: 32): collective uprisings such as the 2025 national strike that interrupt the temporal and material flows that enact capitalist and neofascist domination. These moments, where the body of the collective suspends the delegation of power, reveal alternative sovereignties and temporalities that challenge linear narratives of progress, crisis and reform.

In short, we contribute to STS debates on rising international authoritarianism, the technopolitics of neofascism, and the epistemologies and practices of crisis.

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Short abstract

Environmental contamination is often framed as a crisis demanding urgent remediation. Examining former military-industrial sites in Israel and Palestine, this paper shows how crisis narratives obscure how pollution produces planning paralysis that unintentionally protects urban ecosystems.

Long abstract

Environmental contamination is frequently framed as a crisis demanding urgent remediation and technical intervention. In dominant planning and policy frameworks, pollution appears as a disruption that must be rapidly managed to restore environmental order and enable redevelopment. This paper examines how the category of crisis shapes the way contaminated landscapes are observed, governed, and politically mobilized.

The analysis focuses on three heavily contaminated former military-industrial sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. These landscapes are embedded in the environmental legacies of military-industrial production, occupation, and protracted conflict. Drawing on qualitative analysis of planning protocols, court documents, ecological surveys, and interviews with planners, ecologists, and environmental activists, the paper examines how contamination becomes a specific form of crisis observation within planning and environmental governance.

Paradoxically, the toxicity that renders these landscapes dangerous for human habitation has repeatedly delayed real-estate development, producing prolonged planning uncertainty. In the absence of construction, unexpected ecological assemblages have emerged: rare plant species, wildlife habitats, and informal recreational landscapes flourish because development has been stalled.

Rather than treating contamination as a temporary anomaly demanding resolution, the paper argues that these cases reveal a different dynamic: crisis discourse often obscures alternative socio-ecological realities. By framing contamination primarily as a problem to be solved, crisis narratives legitimize redevelopment projects that would eliminate ecosystems that emerged during decades of planning delay.

The paper therefore analyzes contaminated landscapes as sites where crisis operates as a performative mode of observation, producing epistemic blindness while stabilizing particular political and planning futures.

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Short abstract

This paper reflects on ethnographic research that traces the emergence of a so-called concussion crisis in sports. This popularised imagining provides important insights into crises, particularly how law, science, media, and regulatory practice are constitutive elements.

Long abstract

Narratives about a concussion crisis in sport can be traced to the early 2010s, particularly in the United States. As such concerns have travelled globally in public and scientific discourses, men’s collision sports feature centrally within these framings. This paper reflects on ethnographic research that traces the emergence of the concussion crisis, drawing attention to how popularised imaginings of the harms associated specifically with traumatic brain injury provide important insights into crises generally. Our findings illuminate not only how law, science, media, and regulatory practice are constitutive elements in shaping the concussion crisis, but also how gendered and racialized inequities come to underpin them. We suggest they provide important insights for thinking about construction and maintenance of crises, including when and how they become distinguished as such. These dynamics become clearer when considering who is not included in concussion crisis narratives, including, for example, survivors of domestic, interpersonal, and state violence. As concussion crisis narratives are no longer as prominent in the United States and elsewhere, we conclude by considering what happens to those recognised—and not recognised—as victims of a crisis after it has passed.

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Short abstract

The Fast Danube project, designed after 2007, answered to the navigability crisis on the Lower Danube by the imaginary of riverine states. Though, snags as EU legislation and civic protests reshaped the project, and now the urgency transformed in a long-term program entailing multiple factors.

Long abstract

After 2007, Romania, in collaboration with Bulgaria, proposed an ambitious technological initiative for the Lower Danube, known as the Fast Danube program. This initiative emerged in response to the crisis generated by the declining navigability of the Danube, exacerbated by climate change. The program aims to enhance waterway conditions through the construction of underwater infrastructures. The anticipated outcome is a 20% increase in commercial traffic. However, the program has faced substantial opposition from civil society due to unmet EU environmental standards. While some construction efforts have been made the navigability remains unimproved. Now, over 15 years since the project’s inception, foundational studies are being re-evaluated, incorporating EU environmental policies and adjacent projects that aim to adapt fleet characteristics to the evolving climate conditions affecting navigability. What was once framed as an impending crisis, with the Fast Danube program positioned as the singular solution, is now evolving into a complex scenario of reconfiguring technological parameters for river modification. In this context, the Danube transforms into a socio-hydraulic territory, where the state’s vision is constrained by alternative projections, such as ecological considerations and local community engagements.

This paper explores the socio-environmental dynamics and key stakeholders involved in the Fast Danube program through the STS lens. Drawing on extensive multisited ethnographic fieldwork and using GIS analysis, we aim to contribute to two significant bodies of literature: the emerging STS discourse surrounding post-socialist Europe and the examination of unbuilt infrastructures that linger in the collective consciousness of both the state and local communities.

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Short abstract

Approaching crisis as a socio-technical mode of observation, this paper analyses professional cleaning during Covid-19. It argues that resilient futures are built on mundane infrastructures and invisible labour obscured by crisis framings.

Long abstract

Recent scholarship has demonstrated that 'crisis' serves not only as a description of exceptional events, but also as a powerful observational framework that organises knowledge, responsibility and intervention. This paper argues that crisis framings highlight not only urgency and disruption, but also systematically obscure continuous, mundane and infrastructural forms of labour and vulnerability. Focusing on professional cleaning work during the Covid-19 pandemic, the paper examines how crisis observation produces epistemic blind spots that shape what counts as care, relevance, and resilience.

Empirically, the paper draws on qualitative research conducted within the project "Corona and Care". The analysis examines how cleaning was mobilised as a hygienic infrastructure essential to pandemic management, while remaining excluded from dominant narratives of care, heroism, and recovery. Crisis discourse foregrounded technologies of disinfection, risk management, and organisational control, while marginalising the gendered and racialised labour relations that sustained these infrastructures. Rather than constituting a rupture, the pandemic intensified existing regimes of invisibility and precarisation embedded in everyday practices of maintenance.

Conceptually, the paper approaches crisis as a socio-technical mode of observation that stabilises particular futures while foreclosing others. From this perspective, resilience does not emerge from spectacular innovation or emergency response, but from the ongoing reproduction of fragile infrastructures and undervalued work. Cleaning thus functions as a pivotal domain in which pledges of resilience are contingent upon forms of labour that are systemically unacknowledged. The paper contributes to STS debates on crisis, resilience, and futures by arguing for perspectives that move beyond “the now” of emergency.

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Short abstract

Current geopolitical tensions have spawned discussion about the preparedness for compound urban crises. In these discussions, the revitalization of public shelters for the protection of citizens has emerged as a strategy. This paper studies which crisis imaginaries these shelters embody.

Long abstract

Current geopolitical tensions, the threat of (hybrid) warfare in Europe and climate-related disasters, have spawned discussion about the need to get better prepared for compound urban crises. In these discussions, the revitalization of public bunkers and shelters as critical infrastructures for the protection of citizens has emerged as a potential strategy. Focusing on both the Cold War period and the 2020s, this paper studies how in Dutch cities, the uses and meanings of shelters have changed over time (as objects for civil protection, cultural heritage, obsolete objects, (military) strategic objects, repurposed objects etc) and which crisis imaginaries they embody. Conceptually, the paper takes an infrastructural lens focusing on the debate about the ‘de-infrastructuring’ and ‘re-infrastructuring’ of shelters and the role of obduracy in this process of transformation. Based on an analysis of archival documents on Dutch shelter design and use in the Cold War era, public safety reports and campaigns, newspaper articles as well as Dutch and EU policy reports on civil preparedness, it addresses questions such as: What are the underlying discourses and assumptions regarding the nature, scope and potential impacts of the crises for which public bunkers and shelters were considered as (potential) solutions? How do past governmental decisions regarding bunker and shelter maintenance, investment, technological design, or austerity policies shape the current debate on their role in crisis preparedness in cities? In this way, the paper engages with notions of "crisis", "crisis infrastructure" as well as "crisis infrastructuring" as historically situated political and cultural constructs.