Women in Times of Crisis: Rethinking the Extraordinary and the Everyday

Columbia University, Sciences Po (Paris), Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University

 Alliance on-line conference,  Friday, October 18, 2024

The 21^st century has been one of crisis – financial crises, rising inequalities within and across countries, the COVID pandemic, escalation of terror attacks and wars, looming climate extinction, perilous shrinking of formal employment, fracturing of the world ‘order’, and the rise of populist right-wing governments. Women have often been especially disadvantaged by these shocks. Researchers and advocates have examined the impacts of these crises on gender relations, and, specifically, on the status of women in relation to the intersectional factors that determine their life chances. The particular crises to which they refer provide a temporal/spatial frame – but the significance of ‘thinking through’ crisis as an episteme is rarely thematized. Turning points that alter pre-existing equilibria and which are located in specific series of events, that we denote as “crises,” are often framing devices whose implications remain unexamined. To analyze the “work crises do,” this project seeks to develop research collaboration, and a potential network, between three Alliance institutions (Columbia, Sciences Po and Paris 1).