Introduction: emergency and emergence

There has been a proliferation of books, articles, conferences, special issues and newspaper pieces focusing on the topic of the post-2008 crisis. The number of publications devoted to the different effects of the current crisis is impressive, and yet seven years after the realisation that the world is entering different phases of financial austerity and global capitalist crises a thorough and engaged sociological study of the contemporary milieu is absent (with the exception of a handful of scholars).1 Most analyses of the current crisis are written by journalists and economists and tell a similar story with a few variations. According to this by now, hegemonic story, the current crisis in the European periphery is financial – kick-started in the US in 2008 – and was mostly connected to the American housing bubble. It then unfolded in other parts of the world causing the failure of financial institutions and banks with very alarming political repercussions, such as the rise of far-right, and in some cases outright racist, political parties all over Europe.2 On the other hand, there was also a resurrection of street politics with people gathering on streets and squares demanding equality, justice and democracy. Public uprisings and radical forms of social organisation were usually juxtaposed with riots and extreme performances of nationalist reactions against the crisis.3 According to this story, the collapse of the welfare and healthcare systems, the explosive unemployment rates and the closing of many

medium-size firms are some of the reasons that the 2008 financial crisis transformed into a deep social crisis as well. The intervention of global financial powerhouses such as the International Monetary Fund in national policies was embraced by the global elites and the financial technocrats as the last resort in order to resolve this situation. Even if this story is not entirely false there are some serious problems with the ways the current crisis have been playing out in the media and in scholarly debates. What is particularly problematic are the ways most approaches either seek to quantify social change or embrace a curative function of the economy. The former approach focuses on numbers and colourful graphs and represents the crisis as the continuous juxtaposition of productivity circles, debt figures and unemployment rates, amongst other technocratic measurements of the health of an economy. In some cases, socially focused statistical representations of the crisis offer some very evocative data, for example the figures of the increase in suicide rates and mental health problems in societies that are facing extreme austerity measures over the last years.4 Even if this kind of numerical analysis can capture the hard effects of the crisis, they leave almost unexplored the soft realities of everyday lives, encounters and biographies of a social fabric in crisis. The latter approach – of the curative function – advocates that the solutions to the current crisis should come through the economy and that economics is the explanation for everything. In other words, if there were magical ways to reverse the economic situation and return to positive development rates and profit making, everything would be ‘back to normal’ and we should go ahead and ‘do business as usual’. This approach is the exemplar of the hubris of modern finance and economics, which tend to view the economy as a separate sphere operating with its own rules, having the capacity to self-regulate even in the moments of crisis. This claim is not only overly simplistic but also an integral part of the systemic logic that resulted in the 2008 financial crisis, and many more crises throughout the history of capitalism.5 Moreover, it is an approach that has already failed empirically as Western economies, and Europe in particular, are now entering the seventh consecutive year of crisis. In every case where these kinds of policies were implemented, the economy plunged even further. Nancy Fraser (2011) urges critical theorists to aim at clarifying the nature and roots of crisis in order to explore the prospects of an emancipatory solution. Yet, to achieve this, critical theorists should overcome the deficits of discredited economic approaches and ‘conceptualise crisis as a social process in which economics is mediated by history, culture, geography, politics, ecology and law’ (2011: 138, emphasis added). To put it differently, a critical approach should move away from reductive economism and also carefully avoid romanticising society. Globalisation, economic crises, social marginalisation and social uprisings are some of the pressing concerns shaping our living conditions and contributing to academic, journalistic and popular debates. Yet, in this era of rapid social change, there has to be a growing awareness of the precarity of categories that once seemed fixed. Class, ethnicity, gender and the notion of the nation-state are

some examples of the categories that are called into question by massive social upheavals that respond to social and economic inequalities and injustice. What needs to be reconsidered now is the ways these approaches perpetuate the symptoms of the current crisis, and the ways they make accounts of practices of everyday life. This is precisely the agenda of a sociological analysis of the crisis, an agenda that recognises that the crisis and the concomitant policies of austerity have revised the means by which people survive in different locations. An agenda that takes this as the starting point for exploring the boundaries and borders between the ontological shared experiences of crisis and the epistemological issues this raises – in which previously certain terrains of academic discourses and disciplines need to be re-examined in light of shifting social concerns. In other words, it is important to engage in qualitative research that offers polyvalent, multi-method perspectives on complex matters rather than rely on methodologies that identify problems and offer solutions. This book is the deeply ambitious project of engaging with a social reality that is emergent, contested and resists singular ‘readings’. It moves beyond the tendency to reduce lived realities and social phenomena to mere numbers or problems that need to find solutions. This is because it recognises the relationship between the ways crisis has been schematised as fiscal or financial and the presumption that solutions should be managerial. Instead, the book puts forward a sociological agenda that challenges the epistemological and ontological paradigms of knowledge production: an analysis neither for nor of, but from within these new formations. It raises a set of questions and concerns regarding the hegemonic representations of crisis, the processes of meaning making and the tools of analysis of crisis and extreme austerity. At the same time it recognises the potential for theories to be productive. Not in the ‘traditional’ sense of trying to apply a theory in order to make sense of the rapidly shifting realities but letting these new formations and categories of meaning produce our theories. As Michel Wievorka and Michael Burawoy, former and latter presidents of the International Sociological Association, argue there is an urgent need for an engaged, politically relevant sociology. The 2009 International Sociological Association conference addressed the need to move further than the specialised niches occupied by our disciplinary boundaries in order to unpack the intersecting issues of the current milieu of crisis. In his keynote, Wievorka (2009) suggested that the current crisis is produced by the ‘end of actor, the demise of collective actors, those who play a role in building society’.6 According to Wievorka we need new collective actors such as social movements or we need to return to the old actors such as trade unions. Yet, as Burawoy (2009) rightly points out in his search for new collective actors, what Wievorka did not ask was ‘whether sociology itself ’ could become such an actor, and ‘more generally, what effect the crisis might have on the practice, the organisation, the unity, and even the very possibility of sociology in different parts of the world’.7 As Burawoy put it, the challenge now is to do ‘public intellectual work – to engage multiple publics in multiple ways’ in order to create this new collective actor from below.