28 januari 2025
Combating Crises From Below
Through an exploration of multiple types of crises in a variety of geographical settings in Europe, the chapters compiled in this book offer fresh insight into how particular groups of people work to combat polycrises ‘from below’. How can the convergence of multiple cascading crises create a broader disruptive reality of ‘polycrisis’ in society? How do specific social groups and communities develop purposeful responses to the distinctive forms of insecurity and suffering generated by an enduring polycrisis? Through an exploration of multiple types of crises in a variety of geographical settings in Europe and the United Kingdom, the chapters compiled in this book offer fresh insight into how particular groups of people work to combat polycrises ‘from below’. Cumulatively, the chapters offer an interdisciplinary look at the notion of ‘crisis’ by considering how multiple kinds of crisis (ecology, health, economy, democracy, spirituality, etc.) intersect in concrete social settings to produce localized situations of polycrisis characterized by distinctive ‘geometries’ of crises within crises. The book’s first segment offers some novel conceptual approaches to the inter-disciplinary study of crisis politics ‘from below’. The second part offers a thematically cohesive series of case studies that shed light on the question of how different sets of actors in particular settings across Europe and the United Kingdom have engaged with entrenched polycrisis. The cases range from single mothers, migrants and gentrifying neighbourhoods on the one hand to social movement activists and new age spiritualist groups on the other. Maastricht, June 2023 Kai Heidemann (editor) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University College Maastricht in the Netherlands.