Austerity and Emergency/Crisis
30th June 2014, University of Durham
Specific questions will include:
- How have versions of crisis and emergency been used to justify and legitimise the resource and expectation shrinkage that is austerity?
- Given the state restructuring associated with austerity, how are emergency and crisis connected to new ways of governing life? For example, has welfare provision become a matter of temporary emergency relief or has city governance become a matter of emergency management?
- In what ways are the lines between crisis/emergency and the everyday erased, reproduced, fractured or non-existent as austerity measures and austerity as atmosphere becomes part of everyday lives?
- What purchase do concepts that reconfigure the temporality of crisis and emergency have to understand the lived experience of austere futures?
- How does the sense of urgency that can infuse crisis or emergency relate to the sacrificial logic of austerity as a discourse and affective fact?
- What political moods or atmospheres – such as the predictable-unpredictability that some associate with precarity – are shared between austerity and at least some versions of crisis and emergency?
- How have crisis and emergency been used by states to govern protests and other forms of anti-austerity dissent, as well as anticipate and pre-empt post-austerity alternatives?
- Finally, how do counter movements to austerity draw on and reproduce ideas of crisis and emergency? And what is at stake in using and reproducing the vocabulary of crisis and emergency when critiquing austerity?
Programme
Austere States
Ben Anderson (Geography, Durham): Austerity and Crisis/Emergency
Rebecca Bramall (Media and Cultural Studies, Brighton): Bake Cakes and Save Lives: Normalising the ‘Crisis’ of the State
Paul Langley (Geography, Durham): The Apparatus of Austerity
Living with Austerity
Sarah Hall (Geography, Durham): Intimacy, Crises and Austerity: Affective and Relational Geographies of Family Life
Alison Stenning (Geography, Newcastle): Squeezing the Middle: Austerity, Everyday Crises and Relationships in North Tyneside
Esther Hitchen (Geography, Durham): The ‘Austerian Subject’ and the Multiple Performances of Austerity
Austerity Otherwise
Paul Rodgers & Andy Tennant (Design, Northumbria): Austerity, Crises and the Disruptive Design Turn
Yasmina Reggad (Independent Curator): Arts of Austerity
Rebecca Coleman (Sociology, Goldsmiths): Reflections: Austerity Futures