Events

Workshop "Digitale Disruptionen" of the "AK Digitale Geographien"

23rd to 24th November 2023 in Mainz

Zwischen Glitches, Bugs, Features und Breakdowns – Der Arbeitskreis „Digitale Geographien“ lädt am 23./24.11.2023 an die Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz ein. Bei unserer Workshop-Tagung diskutieren wir in unterschiedlichen Formaten (z.B. Vorträge, Hands-On-Workshops, One-on-One Paper-Feedback) und stellen dabei die digitalen Disruptionen ins Zentrum. Weitere Informationen im Call for Papers.

Organisers: Astrid (Matejcek), Julia (Verne), Julian (Zschocke), Malve (Jacobsen) und Verena (Brinks)

Call for Papers Digitale Disruptionen.

Emerging from Emergencies: Exploring "Crisis" as a Dynamic Opportunity Structure

International and Transdisciplinary Virtual Conference

30th June to 2nd July 2021

Crisis has become a striking and increasingly pervasive feature of the present state of the world. In the most recent past, BREXIT, refugee migration, climate change and COVID-19 mark only the most prominent examples of complex settings in which existential threat forces manifold organisations and political bodies to respond. A crisis is no objectively measurable state of affairs. Rather, it emerges, often surprisingly, if a situation is framed as featuring high degrees of uncertainty, urgency and threat by a significant share of the public (Boin, t’Hart & McConnell 2009). A shared perception crisis has the capacity to entirely change the character of a situation and to turn decision makers into involved participants who become entangled with an escalating course of events (Rosenthal & Kouzmin 1997, p. 286). A crisis diagnosis has thus strong performative qualities. The “tipping point” (Boin, t’Hart & McConnell 2009) from normal to crisis cannot be determined in advance.

An essential feature of today’s time is that crises seem to be less caused by singular events and instead are driven by inherently uncertain, if not disruptive environments (Hällgren, Rouleau & de Rond 2018). Against this background, the crisis experience has turned from an isolated, “low probability/ high consequences event” (Weick 1988: 305) into a rather pervasive experience expanding in time, across spatial borders as well as sectoral and organisational boundaries (Ansell & Boin, 2019). Moreover, crises are increasingly examined from a process perspective situating crisis management at different stages of this process and exploring questions of individual and collective resilience (Williams, Gruber, Sutcliffe, Shepperd & Zhao 2018). In such a setting, the governance of crisis, in the sense of a professional crisis management alone will no longer do. What becomes necessary are novel and complex forms of governance with crisis that are just about to emerge. The overarching aim of the conference is to explore core aspects of these new forms of collective action in crisis. The conference concludes a four-year inter- and transdisciplinary research project entitled “Coping with crises in a resilient manner: The role of expert advice in the creation and use of opportunities in crisis situations (RESKIU)” funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (2017 2021).

Organisers
Verena Brinks | JGU Mainz, Germany
Tjorven Harmsen | IRS Erkner, Germany
Oliver Ibert | IRS Erkner and Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany

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