Conference 3: Living with Permacrisis: Care, Responsibility, Agency and Art
Co-organisers:
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
Building on the first conference’s exploration of the epistemological and historical shift from the modern concept of crisis to the condition of perma- and polycrisis, and the second symposium’s focus on the temporal reconfigurations of the age of permacrisis, the third event in the series will turn to questions of ethics, agency, responsibility, and imagination in a permanently crisis-ridden world. It invites contributions from across the humanities and social sciences to address the epistemological, ethical, narrative and imaginative implications of living with, and within, permacrisis and cascading polycrises.
Epistemology, Narrative and Agency
• How does the idea of crisis, conceived as a series of tipping points, transform, constrain or make room for new approaches to human and more-than-human agency?
• How have precipices, vortexes, thresholds and tipping-points been historically imagined and how are they being imagined in the Anthropocene as a time of permacrisis?
• How can we conceive of beginnings and endings that are not tied to eschatological, apocalyptic or teleological narratives of the techno-utopian kind?
Care, Responsibility and Adaptation
• What forms of care and responsibility (response-ability) are possible when crisis ceases to be an exception and becomes a shared ontological condition? What does caring for an irreparably damaged planet actually entail? What ethical vocabularies are adequate to this condition?
• How can we reimagine human and more-than-human coexistence when the very notion of “crisis resolution” gives way to continuous negotiation, mutual adaptation, and repair? What are the epistemologies and temporalities of repair and adaptation?
• To what extent is the notion of climate resilience a neoliberal idea designed to distract attention from systemic forms of climate injustice and slow violence? How can climate injustice be addressed?
Artistic, Literary and Cultural Interventions:
• What roles can the creative and critical imagination play amid conditions of uncertainty, exhaustion, and fragility?
• In what way can the arts and literature foster hopeful criticism or critical hope, that is a hope which is imbued by criticism but not defeatist?
• Case studies of literary and artistic responses to permacrisis are especially welcome. We also invite experimental or practice-based contributions that reflect on artistic research, curatorial practices, or activist engagements with perma- and polycrisis.
Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Please send a title, abstract (150 words) and bio blurb (5 lines) by 15 January 2026 to: anne.fuchs@ucd.ie, ingvild.folkvord@ntnu.no, marek.tamm@tlu.ee, monika.bakke@amu.edu.pl, jean.lassegue@gmail.com
For further information see: https://www.ucd.ie/humanities/research/frommoderncrisistopermacrisisandpolycrisis