Critical geographies of $everyday$ $crisis$

Abstract

In various domains of social and political life, ‘crisis’ has become a ubiquitous taken-for-granted narrative. This ubiquity risks diminishing the political significance and meaning of the term and flattening the existing unequal geographies of crisis globally. This paper presents the theoretical framework of the Special Feature ‘Critical geographies of everyday crisis’ that aims to complicate existing understandings and redefine crisis as a condition of contemporary urban everyday life. By integrating critical scholarship on crisis and the everyday, these seemingly contradictory concepts are grounded in the contemporary experiences of pervasive crises globally. The collection of papers offers empirical insights from various socio-spatial contexts and domains of everyday life and puts in perspective interdependencies between crisis experiences. Everyday crisis challenges eventful ascriptions to crisis in order to better parse the distinct spatial and temporal characteristics and unequal power relations within contemporary crises. In doing so, everyday crisis also facilitates the reading of quieter registers of subjectivity, agency, and politics across different urban contexts and domains of everyday life.