What makes a crisis?

A crisis podcast!

Mini Assignment 2, course Researching Africa in the 21st century, October 2023

By Frederike Bonekamp & Laura Eppinga

To investigate the true meaning of crisis thinking, Frederike Bonekamp and I made a podcast about the visibility of crisis thinking about Africa in documentaries about climate change on the African continent. In the podcast, two documentaries found on YouTube included below, were analyzed to better understand the impact of crisis thinking (about climate change in Africa) on the viewers of the documentaries.

Documentary 1: Seychelles – paradise under threat.

Documentary 2: Fleeing climate change – the real environmental disaster.

Down below is my personal investigation into the concept of crisis to better understand crisis thinking, the dangers of crisis thinking and its relation to the African continent and climate change. This little investigation formed the foundation of the podcast.

What makes a crisis?

Sometimes it is necessary to evaluate key principles we have learned and accepted to better understand the true reach and impacts of these concepts. One of these principles to evaluate is the word crisis, here in relation to climate change. I have always thought of climate change to be an umbrella, consisting of multiple natural processes, of which some in my eyes can indeed be defined as a crisis. I would call the current biodiversity loss in the Netherlands as a crisis, especially when looking at the speed of losing insect and bird species; we have lost over two-thirds of all our insect species, and 1 in 5 bird species present in Europe are now listed as ‘Endangered’. Extreme biodiversity loss can also be seen less close to home, like with the loss of coral reefs; in the Caribbean, corals are disappearing at the rate of 5.5% to 9.2% since the last 25 years and over 33% of all coral species are listed as endangered on the IUCN red list. Given this, it is not surprising that biodiversity loss and climate change in general can be explained as a global crisis. However, labeling situations and events a crisis might not be as innocent as one thinks. There is no clear description of criteria for an event to be a crisis, and no clear entity in power to declare a crisis. Therefore, many situations can be a crisis, think of a personal mental health crisis, financial crisis, organizational crisis, natural disaster crisis, etc. Because of this weak definition of the word ‘crisis’ the concept can be applied to many situations and can actually become harmful for the people involved or affected by the ‘crises.’ Given this, it is good to evaluate upon the terms and concepts used in everyday life to ensure you are not passively or actively enforcing problems for the people involved in the crisis you talk about.

What is a ‘crisis’?

When looking for the idea behind the word crisis, I came across the American anthropologist Janet Roitman. During her interesting academic career, she looked into this concept behind the word ‘crisis’ and how the term currently is used. She has written two books about this concept, the first one being ‘Fiscal Disobedience: An anthropology of economic regulation in Central Africa’ and the second one is called ‘Anti-crisis’. When reading about her ideas, mostly explained in her second book ‘Anti-crisis’ I resonated with her views on the idea of ‘crisis.’ In the article called ‘Research article: afterword – The end of perpetual crisis’ written by Roitman (2022), she explains the idea of the word crisis is a way to give structure to amorphous phenomena. Explained less complicated; you can say that the idea of ‘crisis’ or ‘we live in times of crisis’ explains history in the ongoing stream of phenomena. The concept of a crisis is one of the easiest ways to explain noteworthy events in the constant motion of life. However, the word crisis is in reality just a concept, made up by medical staff, or coming forth from Christian theology and European traditions, and crisis was most likely used to describe a result of inevitable tendencies. Nowadays, the word crisis is used to signify epistemological rupture, or the failure of forms of knowledge to account for significant events in our world.

Nowadays, the word crisis has gained a connected value of being bad: a crisis is bad. Through this lens, the word crisis is used to study various communities worldwide in their approach to the vicissitudes, the calamities, and the brutalities of life. Multiple communities in different situations can be included in the same ‘crisis’ is because a crisis can be used to describe fundamental shared experiences of people, not limited to their geographical location and different living circumstances and situations. Furthermore, crisis is not defined to a time-period, and can be an acute event (an incident or a shock) or an enduring endeavor (an ongoing state). The concept of ‘crisis’ can be found in all academic fields, like mental health (think of a person with a mental health crisis) or humanitarianism (the hunger crisis in Africa). Which allows knowledge creation surrounding crisis to morph into explaining crisis as a problem to be experienced. In other words, it has become a method to measure of human failure and crisis thinking. Within knowledge creation, the experts feel like they have to visualize the experiences of people living in ‘crisis’ to represent these experiences, however in doing so, harmful ways of crisis thinking are helped into the world, creating even larger issues of truthful representation of the affected communities, in the world full of crisis. Additionally, the declaration of a crisis allows for blind spots in the reproduction of knowledge. It makes certain things very viable (in focus) and others invisible. According to what Roitman explained in her interview published in Journal of Cultural Economy (2020) called ‘Anti-Crisis: thinking with and against crisis excerpt from interview with Janet Roitman’, it is greatly beneficial to ask yourself: what does the crisis want me to focus on, and what is it hiding?

“The main proposition of Anti-Crisis is that the concept of crisis is an enabling blind spot for the production of knowledge. It is a distinction that is not seen as a blind spot, but rather as an error or deformation – a discrepancy between the world and knowledge of the world. But if we take crisis to be a blind spot – or a distinction, which makes certain things visible and others invisible – it is merely an a priori. However, it should be noted that this does not amount to denying the crisis. The point is to take note of the effects of the claim to crisis, to be attentive to the effects of our very accession to that judgment.” (Roitman, Aguiton, Cornilleau, & Cabane, 2020)

To combat the under- and over representation of some groups and ways of thinking in the crisis world is to invite new ways of thinking about the concept of crisis. One of these radical new ways of thinking is to challenge the current notion that a crisis is a state of being which differs from the ‘normal’ or ‘stable’ way of being. This way of thinking raises many questions like who gets to decide what this ‘normal’ or ‘stable’ way of life is? Roitman notes that it is important to understand that a crisis is, in theory, just a claim made by a group of people: it is our way to qualify the observable world. Which is explained by Roitman (2022) in the following passage of her article ‘Research article: afterword – The ends of perpetual crisis’:

“Asking those constitutive questions has political import. For instance, if a tree falls silently in the forest, how and when does it qualify as an indicator of climate change? How and when does a tree falling in the forest without a witness become an indicator and evidence of an environmental crisis? If there is no witness, the tree falling silently in the forest is not inscribed in the annals of history; it is not accounted for as a signifier, as an index, as an event. Trees falling silently in forests for decades were not taken to be indicators of an environmental crisis. However, there were, of course, witnesses: Indigenous residents and Indigenous communities, and custodians of lands, who, while not necessarily claiming ‘environmental crisis,’ articulated propositions and explanations for the dying trees and changing ecosystems. Their terms are salient. There is much to learn from their terms and modes of reasoning, which give insight into alternative manners of apprehending ecosystems and socio-ecological transformation. We increasingly now narrate human history in terms of environmental crisis (the Anthropocene) – that is, as a fundamental premise of our history-as-crisis – despite decades, if not a century, of warming atmospheric and ocean temperatures, trees falling silently in forests, and millions of witnesses speaking on their terms. Clearly, the claim to crisis renders certain forms of knowledge legible and others illegible or unaccounted for”. (Roitman, Research article: afterword – The end of perpetual crisis, 2022)

Sources

Roitman, J. (2022). Research article: afterword – The end of perpetual crisis. Global discourse(3-4), pp. 692-696.

Roitman, J., Aguiton, S. A., Cornilleau, L., & Cabane, L. (2020). Anti-crisis: thinking with and against crisis excerpt from interview with Janet Roitman. Journal of Cultural Economy, 6, pp. 772-778. doi:10.1080/17530350.2020.1807388