From Modern Crisis to Permacrisis and Polycrisis

From Modern Crisis to Permacrisis and Polycrisis

Project funded by the UCD Strategic and Major Initiative Scheme

A transnational research project funded by the UCD Strategic and Major Initiative Scheme in collaboration with the Universities of Tallinn (Estonia), Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań (Poland); Arsenal Municipal Gallery, Poznań; The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim (Norway); The Museum of Literature Ireland and NGO Fighting Words, Dublin. This interdisciplinary and collaborative research project is the first to analyze the shift from the modern idea of crises as an exceptional state towards permacrises and polycrises as the ontological condition of a world at risk in the 21st century. Anchored in the humanities, this project adopts an innovative transdisciplinary and comparative framework to disrupt the crisis narratives of Western (post-)modernity. By bringing together researchers from smaller and ‘peripheral’ countries across Eastern, Western, and Northern Europe, the consortium aims to break down the dominant European crisis narrative: case studies compare and contrast local and regional responses to permacrisis across the five participating member states.

Originally coined in the 1970s, the word polycrisis has gained currency for crises that ‘interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts’ (Tooze 2022). In today’s world crisis no longer designates a single problem that develops into an accelerating crisis, mobilizing urgent crisis management. Polycrisis captures complex and interacting processes with planetary consequences. In 2022 Collins Dictionary selected ‘permacrisis’ as word of the year. As David Shariatmadari has put it, ‘“Permacrisis” is a term that perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner.’ The accelerating climate crisis is both a perma- and polycrisis which unfolds with asymmetrical negative effects in the Global South.

Despite the growing awareness that we live in an age of perma- and polycrisis, to date most research has focused on the modern notion of crisis that emerged in Western Europe in the 18th century in the context of the temporalization of history (Koselleck 2006). The modern meaning of crisis as a tipping point that requires active crisis management emerged rather late in the history of the term. In ancient Greek, the verb ‘κρίνειν’ (krínein) means a) to separate and divide between two things or people or among a group of things or people, b) to enquire, investigate in a judicial sense, and c) the selection of the best. The noun ‘crisis’ derives from Greek ‘krino’ and means a decision, however, not in the modern sense.

After the French Revolution crisis became a criterion for what counts as history: without crises there is no discernible history and no historical narration. However, the episteme “crisis” is paradoxical: as the engine of a progressively developing modern history, crises testify, on the one hand, to the history making power of humankind and, on the other, to its limits because modern history is contingent. Crises therefore simultaneously mobilize and challenge human agency; they represent historical contingency and its mastery; they embody both normality and epochal change; they are predictable and unpredictable at the same time. Furthermore, because of the temporal urgency of crises, crisis discourse often delegitimizes criticism, even though both terms are intrinsically linked. As Janet Roitman argues in her book Anti-Crisis, crisis is a blind spot in the production of knowledge:

Crisis is claimed, but it remains a latency; it is never itself explained because it is necessarily further reduced to other elements, such as capitalism, economy, neoliberalism, finance, politics, culture, subjectivity. In that sense, crisis is not a condition to be observed (loss of meaning, alienation, faulty knowledge); it is an observation that produces meaning. More precisely, it is a distinction that secures a ‘world’ for observation. (Janet Roitman, Anti-Crisis, Duke University Press, 2013, p. 39).

Faced with the epistemological legacy of western crisis discourse, our symposium aims to debate the shift from the modern understanding of crisis to perma- and polycrisis. We will ask: how does the age of perma/poly crisis reconfigure modern historical time? How does it relate to deep geological and other, non-European temporal modes and to the idea of multiple temporalities? How does the idea of perma/polycrisis transform the risk assessment strategies that are part and parcel of reflexive modernity (U. Beck)? Is it possible to imagine liveable futures which eschew the dystopian perspective of end-time scenarios? To what extent does the idea of permacrisis allow for the displacement or dismantling of the anthropocentric worldview which is a major cause of crisis in the Anthropocene? How and to what extent do perma/poly crises make room for modes of entanglement that include non-human life forms and environments? What are the alternatives to the established crisis practice that turns the challenges of the Anthropocene into phenomena that can be identified, managed, and ultimately eliminated? How does the idea of perma/poly crisis affect civil society and democratic participation? How can we reconceive and promote the idea of the self not as a sovereign rational entity facing the world as Other but as a relational and interdependent being? How can we maintain and foster critical optimism in the age of perma/poly crisis? What kinds of affective relations can be engendered in relation to perma/polycrisis?

The first symposium in May will address these and other issues.

Building on the first symposium in Dublin (22–24 May 2025), the second meeting, hosted by Tallinn University, will seek to address a series of questions outlined in the call for papers. We are particularly interested in contributions that question the anthropocentric assumptions of crisis discourse, and that explore how the idea of permacrisis might open onto more entangled, multiscalar, multispecies, or planetary perspectives.

Project Events

22-24 May 2025 | Interdisciplinary Symposium 1 | UCD Humanities Institute

25-27 September 2025 | Interdisciplinary Symposium 2: Temporalities of permacrisis: pasts, presents, futures | Tallinn University

5 & 12 November 2025 | Creative Responses to Crisis: Spoken Word & Creative Expression Workshops

10 March 2026 | Festival of Ideas: Living in a State of Permacrisis (UCD Humanities Institute in collaboration with the Museum of Literature Ireland) 

Location: Museum of Literature Ireland

Featuring nationally and internationally renowned writers and artists as well as emerging voices, the Festival is the culmination of our collaboration with art practitioners. Contributors include: Kurdish author Burhan Sönmez (latest novel The Lovers of Franz K), Syrian-Irish writer Suad Aldarra (author of I don’t want to talk about Home), Sarah Moss (latest book: My Good Bright Wolf), Emilie Pine (latest novel: Ruth & Pen), Patrick Deeley (latest collection: Keepsake)  and Eva Bourke (latest collection: Tattoos) as well as artists Peeter Laurits (Estonia), artist Bassam Issa Al-Sabah (Iraq/Ireland) and Helen Doherty (Ireland). Other contributors are Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe from Skein Press and Prof Francesco Pilla (Smart & Sustainable Cities Spatial Dynamics Lab, UCD). We are planning a vibrant day of talks, interactive workshops, performances, and exhibits to showcase how innovative artistic practice and research in the humanities can help us address the range of connected crises we face and the potential of recovering political agency and hope.

13 March 2026 | Interdisciplinary Workshop-Symposium | Aesthetics of Polycrises: Practices of Resistance and Resilience

Location: Municipal Gallery Arsenał, Poznań

An international one-day workshop/symposium organized by Prof Monika Bakke (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań) and Prof Marek Wasilewski (Municipal Art Gallery Poznań).

• Call for Papers | Aesthetics of Polycrises: Practices of Resistance and Resilience | Deadline: 10 January 2026 | Download CfP document HERE

6-7 May 2026 | Interdisciplinary Conference 3 | Living with Permacrisis: Care, Responsibility,  Agency and Art

Location: Fondation Maison des Sciences de L’homme, 54 Boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris 

An international 1.5/2 day conference co-organized by Professor Anne Fuchs, Humanities Institute, University College Dublin; Professor Ingvild Folkvord, NTNU, Trondheim/Humboldt University Berlin; Professor Marek Tamm, Tallinn University; Professor Monika Bakke, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań; Professor Jean Lassègue, Centre Georg Simmel, EHESS, Paris.

• Call for Papers | Living with Permacrisis: Care, Responsibility, Agency and Art | Deadline: 15 January 2026 | Download CfP document HERE

Project Image credit: Abstract 2025 collage and oil on paper 25 x 25 cm (c) Judy Carroll Deeley