This is the second webinar in the Virtual Dialogues series centred on the newly released book Global Cooperation in Times of Crisis: Grasping the Changing Mood of the World. The series explores how “epochal moods” shape the possibilities for global cooperation and asks what became of the spirit associated with 2015, marked by the adoption of major international frameworks such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Paris Agreement on climate change.

While previous session centred on unpacking the notion of mood and how a time can be said to obtain a mood of crisis, this second webinar shifts attention to the nature of crisis, including how it is experienced, mediated, and challenged.

Crisis is not an objective condition but a subjective descriptor of situations. There is very rarely complete agreement on what constitutes a crisis and it is also a highly political matter what should be done about them (or to avoid them). It is also often difficult to trace origins and root causes.

The webinar will explore the meaning of crisis and whether our time is different from previous epochs. If we live in a crisis we must first understood why our time can be described as one of crisis. This seminar will equip us for the discussions ahead by clarifying not only the definitions of crisis but also what kind of work the enactment of crisis does in the social and political world, including in development cooperation.

Participants will reflect on the meaning of crisis and its implications: how agencies adapt to crisis, explot crises, respond to crises, and how cooperation shifts in times of crisis. Seeing crisis as not only an objective condition or subjective experience, the speakers will problematise what it means to speak of global cooperation in times of crisis and whether crisis terminology is the most fruitful way forward for the discussion ahead.

Speakers: 

• Reidar Staupe — Associate Professor of Societal Security and Aurora Fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and Adjunct Associate Professor at Oslo New College
• Isaac Hoff  — Cultural studies scholar and a Lecturer in Media and Sociology at the University of Glasgow
• Dariusz Gafijczuk  — Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Newcastle

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