Polycrisis Network
A transdisciplinary community researching (in) a world of interconnected crises
What does this mean?
The Polycrisis Network at the University of Leeds is a collective of people in and outside academia working together to understand the interconnection of crises in the world around us.
Our work is grouped around three main areas:
1. Mapping Polycrisis – how do different crises gain movement and recognition and how are they acted upon, for example politically, by governments and the media? How does this lead to disruption, duration and catastrophe?
2. Analysing Polycrisis – what are the properties and processes involved in interconnected crises and how do they come into being, how do we identify them and what are their effects?
3. Transforming Polycrisis – how do we understand the rhythms and the potential to learn and act through them, using, for example, our bodies, socially and environmentally, and how can creative methods help this understanding?
Our aim is to rethink the conditions of how crises emerge, their effects and their possibilities.
Many accounts of polycrisis engage with the idea as a set of interconnected challenges associated with the forming of existential risks (threats to the global collapse of society or humanity). These accounts usually seek innovative social, political and technical solutions.
This network instead seeks to rethink the world through polycrisis and to ask what living in an era of multiple overlapping crises means for how we conduct research across disciplines and methods.
Why are we doing this?
From financial crisis to the cost-of-living crisis, the housing crisis, the mental health crisis and the climate crisis, our current era seems to be defined by an unfolding set of interconnected crises.
This era of overlapping and simultaneous crises that is being referred to more and more as ‘polycrisis’ is increasingly unpredictable with no end in sight. The emergence, resurgence and disappearance of multiple crises presents new sets of challenges brought about by endless changes to what we think of as normal and stable.
The concept of polycrisis raises important questions about its histories, spaces, times, substances, and effects. It prompts questions about what kind of thinking, ideas and methods are needed to engage with a world increasingly understood through crisis.
We ask how does the concept of polycrisis and its increasing appearance in everyday life, shed light on the limits of disciplinary knowledge. And in response, how transdisciplinary activity can help define, identify, and act upon multiple, interconnected global crises.
This involves paying attention to how various forms of knowledge have been used in the forming, development, and analysis of polycrisis as well as rethinking the political or what it means to be together, as a collective fabric.