Europeans increasingly describe their present moment as one of permanent crisis—climate, war, migration, economic collapse—yet the word “crisis” itself remains poorly understood. This project asks what it actually means to live in crisis time, and whether crisis feels different from normal time. The problem is that policymakers, journalists, and citizens use “crisis” to label everything from a heatwave to a refugee surge, but no one has systematically studied how people *experience* the passage of time during such events. Does a war zone shrink the future? Does economic precarity stretch the present? The researchers will embed themselves in three European regions—Eastern Europe (conflict), the Mediterranean (economy), and Scandinavia (migration)—to collect ethnographic accounts, analyse art and literature, and work with museums and archives. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven research in the humanities. It will not produce a policy tool or a diagnostic device. But by clarifying how crisis reshapes people’s sense of past, present, and future, it could help public institutions—from museums to NGOs—communicate more honestly about what “crisis” actually does to human lives, rather than using the word as a vague alarm.
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Europe is in polycrisis: Climate, economy, migration, democracy, armed conflict and academia are pertinent fields where crisis abounds. This project explores the temporal registers of crisis, the vernacular articulation of life in turmoil, and the cultural dynamics expressed in crisis contexts. The central contention is the need to unravel what we term ‘times of crisis’. Centered in anthropology and working across art, history, ethnology and philosophy, this project critically places time at the heart of crisis work, asking what it means to live in times of crisis, how crisis changes over time, and how crisis is perceived in hindsight. Critically, what distinguishes ‘crisis time’ from ‘normal time’? Framing current conditions as ‘crisis’ or projecting time itself as being ‘in crisis’ are prevailing sensibilities in much discourse about polycrisis in Europe and beyond. This project offers empirical, methodological and theoretical apparatuses to better analyze what such crisis attentiveness effects, interrogating what the diverse yet now common category of ‘crisis’ accomplishes. Offering ethnographic takes on philosophical questions concerning ‘times of crisis’, each work package addresses three temporal pins – past, present, and future. The work packages focus on individual nodes of polycrisis in three regional settings: Eastern Europe (war and conflict), Mediterranean (economy), Scandinavia (migration), with shared research questions designed to aid comparison and comprehension. Empirically, the project highlights the diverse ways times of crisis are inhabited, methodologically it shows how times of crisis are expressed in art and literature, and theoretically it poses socio-philosophical questions concerning the temporal coordinates of crisis. Beyond the academy, activities will engage partners at the National Museum of Denmark, EthnoFest Athens, Open Society Archives Budapest, Post Bellum NGO, Divadlo Feste, and the Slovene Ethnological Association.
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