Published on Tuesday, February 27, 2024
Abstract
The doctoral students of the Advanced Course in History at the Scuola Normale Superiore are organizing the first International PhD Workshop, dedicated to the theme of crisis from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age. With this workshop, we aim to open a dialogue around the theme within the panels, spanning medieval, modern, and contemporary history, attempting to examine how crises andemergencies have been perceived, conceptualized, framed, and governed throughout history indifferent fields: from politics to economics, from the environment to culture.
Announcement
June 27-28, 2024
Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa Palazzo della Carovana - Sala Azzurra
Argument
The concept of crisis has become so pervasive in public discourse, on a rhetorical and metaphoricallevel, that its analytical capacity is weakened: due to its normalization, it is difficult to reflect criticallyon the use of this concept, particularly in its relationship with the concept of "normality" (Holton,1987). We owe a historical genealogy of the concept to Reinhart Koselleck, who highlighted how, fromthe medical field in ancient Greece, the term, used metaphorically, expanded to politics, economics,and history from the 17th century (Koselleck, 2006).The recent years have been characterized by the narrative of an almost uninterrupted succession ofcrises. Economic shocks, global warming, the pandemic emergency, the reshaping of internationalrelations, resorting to war, deep divisions within society and political systems, international andinternal terrorism, migration phenomena, are just a few examples of what is interpreted todaythrough the category of crisis: the more recent one being «polycrisis» (Morin, 1999; Tooze, 2021), developed in an attempt to represent the complexity arising from the intersection or overlap ofdifferent and increasingly uncontrollable phenomena. The perception is that the crisis no longerspeaks of exceptional moments of «drama and decision» (Starn, 1971; Schmitt, 1922), but of permanent or at least extended states over time. If, in terms of politics, this changes the approachto crisis in managerial terms, in historiographical terms, it translates into a shift in the relationshipwith time: that of the present and the historical time of the past. In the absence of an idea ofprogress capable of supporting the conceptual framework of a crisis as a "passage" toward a newfuture, the crisis folds back, becoming an attribute of an eternal present, increasingly less able torepresent itself as a decisive moment.On the political level, the recourse to the paradigm of emergency becomes a representation of anextremely contingent present thought, where the priority is the restoration of the status quo ante,rather than the transition to a new stage.
The concept of a state of exception, the suspension of therules it requires, and the set of historically differentiated political practices adopted to achieve it(Benigno and Scuccimarra, 2007) rise to the status of a «dominant governing paradigm ofcontemporary politics» (Agamben, 2003), reproducing the simulacrum of the decisive moment without resolving it with a transformation towards a new arrangement.Reflecting on what crises and emergencies signify today poses a certainly intriguing challenge forhistoriography. With this workshop, we aim to open a dialogue around the theme within the panels,spanning medieval, modern, and contemporary history, attempting to examine how crises andemergencies have been perceived, conceptualized, framed, and governed throughout history indifferent fields: from politics to economics, from the environment to culture.
- The perspective we intend to adopt is that of political history, with a particular focus on:
- how politics and the power it embodies organize, reorganize, legitimize, or re-legitimizethemselves in the face of or thanks to these occasions, both at the discursive andgovernance practice levels;
- the role of historical actors and the weight of their conflicting representations of crises andemergencies, both in terms of discourses and practices;
- an effort to re-historicize the concept, reflecting on what "crisis" means in each moment itis used as an interpretative or discursive category, and what lexicons are associated with it;
- reflecting on whether and how crises can still be observed as "laboratories" of the future orif they have transformed into something different.
Submission guidelines
Contributions are welcome in Italian, English and French by graduate students and young Ph.D, who have obtained their degree within the last six years (reference date: the deadline of this call for papers).
Proposals should summarize the content of the presentation in a maximum of five hundred words,include a reference bibliography (6 to 10 titles), and a brief curriculum vitae ac studiorum of nomore than two hundred and fifty words.
All materials should be sent to the email workshopcrisi2024@sns.it in a single document, including the contact details of the candidates,
by March 31, 2024.
All details and the calls in Italian, English and French can be found at the following address: https://www.sns.it/it/evento/krisis-una-storia-dal-medioevo-alleta-contemporanea
Organizing Committee
- Alessandro Brizzi, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Giulia Corrado, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Umberto Maria Delmastro, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Giulia Lovison, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Manuela Pacillo, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Federico Ricci, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Giacomo Santoro, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Jacopo Sassera, Scuola Normale Superiore
- Vittoria Vaccaro, Scuola Normale Superiore
Subjects
- Modern (Main category)
- Society > Political studies > Political history
Places
- Palazzo della Carovana, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa - Piazza dei Cavalieri, 7
Pisa, Italian Republic (56126)
Event attendance modalities
Full on-site event
Date(s)
- Sunday, March 31, 2024
Keywords
- crisis
Reference Urls
Information source
- Giulia Corrado
courriel : workshopcrisi2024 [at] sns [dot] it
License
This announcement is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal.
To cite this announcement
« Krisis. For a History from the Middle Ages to the Contemporary Age », Call for papers, Calenda, Published on Tuesday, February 27, 2024, https://doi.org/10.58079/vwu8