Polycrisis: Critical and Creative Responses

The CIDRAL theme for this year is Polycrisis.

The term polycrisis has become ubiquitous in academic and policy debates about the challenges facing the contemporary world. Popularised by (among others) Adam Tooze, the term now evokes the interconnection and amplification of economic and environmental crises, and violent conflict. For some, the concept has provided an effective means to describe or to understand the unprecedented kinds of global challenge, for others its use has lacked precision and therefore serious critical value, or has become dangerously overextended.

This year CIDRAL invites researchers in SALC to reflect on and interrogate the concept of polycrisis. How can perspectives from our disciplines help us to understand the utility and the limits of this term? What are the implications of conditions of economic, environmental, and geopolitical crises for our research, or for the arts and humanities more broadly? How might interdisciplinary methods and collaborations help us respond to these conditions?

Starting points for our discussions might include:

• Archiving polycrisis/polycrisis in the archives
• Creative methods and responses to polycrisis
• Global and local manifestations and meanings of polycrisis
• Resisting and challenging polycrisis
• Living with and through polycrisis
• Communicating and representing polycrisis
• The roles of AI in polycrisis