TiCToC: Times in Crisis, Times of Crisis: The Temporalities of Europe in Polycrisis

This project explores the experience of time in the context of polycrisis Europe. Time is often absent from humanities studies of crisis. Yet, anticipating, living in, and reflecting on crisis has a distinctly temporal dimension. In crisis, people may feel like the clock is ticking (“TiC[k]ToC[k]”), or time is running out to avert crisis or deal with its effects. Starting with socio-philosophical questions regarding times of crisis, working with methodologies from across the humanities, and producing artistic, literary and performative outputs, TiCToC aims to restore the temporal to crisis studies. We will diagnose crisis time in Europe, critique the claim that Europe is at an ‘unprecedented’ juncture in time characterised by overlapping and intertwined crises, and assess the emerging polycrisis trope for delivering knowledge about European social worlds at this point in history. To these ends, TiCToC engages in qualitative research in 6 field sites across 3 regions where multiple crises are playing out: conflict in the European East, economic decline in the Mediterranean, and migration in Scandinavia. Each case study exemplifies how one type of crisis is influenced by numerous others, helping us comparatively rethink crisis temporalities across dimensions of what is commonly referred to as polycrisis: meaning the social, economic, and political aspects of crisis and their interwoven character.