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

The 21st century (in the western world) has been one of crisis, beginning with 9/11 and other attacks, financial crises, wars, a global pandemic, hardening inequalities, rising populist discourses and the ever-greater impact of global warming. 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 conference seeks to develop research collaboration, and a potential network, between Columbia University in the City of New York , Sciences Po Paris and the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.