In Case of Emergency: Catastrophe, Climate and Capitalism

Conference dates: November 6–7, 2026
Submission deadline: June 30, 2026

When we trace the genealogy of crisis, it can seem as if we’ve always been surrounded by catastrophe. Different factions of the ruling class tell us that we need to be prepared, but also that preparation may be fruitless. Crises shift and expand, strengthening their hold on us through their very instability. The state of emergency, after all, “is not the exception but the rule,” as Walter Benjamin theorized. It is not a single event but what Lauren Berlant called a norm “embedded” in the everyday. In the zones of crisis and in daily life, the emergency overwhelms the senses, demanding constant self-governance and limiting our political imagination.

The urgent threat of climate change, though often disavowed, is at the center of today’s general atmosphere of crisis. Walls hold back displaced populations and rising seas. Earth systems sustain lasting damage. Species are devastated. And with apocalyptic alacrity, capitalist-imperialist competition crosses terrains that were once uninviting and hostile, from deserts to the polar regions and outer space.

So far, discourses of risk and emergency have mostly been a boon for the racist right and anti-democratic technocrats, rather than contributing to a genuine project of planetary stewardship. The quest for “energy sovereignty” has unleashed a wave of extractive interventions in the Global South amid the collapse of the postwar international order, creating new sacrifice zones and colonial resource frontiers. Amid widespread doubts about electoral institutions’ ability to deliver systemic transformation, some environmentalists have embraced climate doomerism or the technosolutionism of geoengineering. We see how climate crisis is increasingly governed through biopolitical management, securitized borders, and technocratic forms of environmental control—and how the emergency becomes yet another opportunity for further administration.

Crisis discourse often privileges spectacular catastrophe while obscuring the slow, uneven, and racialized forms of ecological violence embedded in everyday life. Unlike the “fevered immediacy that governs the society of the catastrophe-as-spectacle,” Rob Nixon writes, unspectacular “slow violence” is dispersed over time. With the sirens blaring, it is easy to lose sight of the material impacts of the ideology of crisis across time and space. We can also miss the ways in which the permanent emergency warps our cultural production and social relations, concealing the most pressing contradictions of capitalism today. How might we map the cartography of crisis? In doing so, can we open space for alternative ways of thinking and living within and against crisis? How do we hold crisis at bay long enough to bring about a “real state of emergency,” as Benjamin says is our task?

Jason Moore (Binghamton) and Gökçe Günel (Rice) will deliver keynote addresses at the conference, which will feature the work of graduate students and other researchers in the humanities and social sciences, alongside a curated program of poetry readings and film screenings. This conference is organized by Aditi Kini, Tadhg Larabee, Ernest Lee, and Yolian Ogbu in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory.

We want to investigate how crisis is produced, circulated, and inhabited across domains, including climate, culture, political economy, media, and governance. Through this cartography of crisis, we hope to understand how we might countermap and counteract this state of ecological and social emergency.

Our goal is to create space for imagination and speculation with people of varied backgrounds, interests, and praxes. We welcome interdisciplinary scholarship and cultural criticism attentive to the cultural, aesthetic, historical, and political dimensions of crisis. We imagine submissions might discuss:

Technosolutionism and the dilemmas of growth
Speculation, commodities, and disaster capitalism
Fossil life as economy and desire
Green neoliberalism as a political and cultural form
Enclosure and destruction of the commons: water, forests, air and more
Hydrocolonialism, oceanic crisis, and blue humanities
Border ecologies, displacement, and the production of space
State-making, world-making, and the remaking of political, social and ecological orders
Toxic temporalities, slow violence, and “post”-colonial precarity
Apocalypse and new worlds in literature and culture
Climate pessimisms and the politics of fear and hope in crisis
Resistance, strikes, and land back: movements and solidarity
Community, care, and affective ecologies of crisis

To apply, submit an abstract (max. 300 words) and a CV via the Google form at the link by June 30, 2026. Participants without access to institutional funding will have the opportunity to request travel support, though we cannot guarantee it.