Never Waste a Crisis: Strategies of Representing and Managing Crisis after the Crash

Konferenz organisiert von Amelie Kutter im Rahmen des von Bob Jessop geleiteten Projekts ‚A Cultural Political Economy of Crisis Management‘, Lancaster Universität 1.-2. November 2012; http://www.lancs.ac.uk/cperc/events/seminars.htm

Abstract: The North Atlantic Financial Crisis that surfaced in 2007/08 and subsequent efforts at crisis management have produced unstable constellations. Whereas the financial sector has been rescued with large injections of capital but minor structural adjustments, the symptoms in many economies of “epic recession” and fiscal crisis remain. Among political and economic elites, such finance-centred crisis management remains largely unchallenged. At the same time, the economic and social costs of the austerity packages and of a finance-dominated economy more generally have spurred contestation from various quarters.

The conference on “Strategies of Representing and Managing Crisis after the Crash” seeks to explore the politics (broadly interpreted) of this unstable constellation. Papers will review different agents’ strategies of tackling the North Atlantic Financial Crisis through discursive construction, contestation, and policy-making. They highlight the discursive and semiotic of economic and political processes or situate the analysis of crisis discourse in broader questions of political economy.