SCAS Workshop – Beyond Crisis: Emerging Temporalities in a Warming World

Workshop description

Since the founding of IPCC in 1988, global societies have struggled to encompass the wide-ranging impact of anthropogenic climate change. This challenge has been predominantly approached through the concept of crisis. This workshop addresses the limitations of this view. Three major shortcomings of the analytical and political framework of crisis particularly comes to mind.

First of all, it positions climate change on the same level as other disruptive events, for example pandemics, war and financial crises, with the inevitable effect that climate action is measured against and postponed by other crises and a proliferating tactics of ‘states of exception’. The second aspect concerns the original meaning of crisis as a transitional moment with a distinctive before and after. In terms of climate policy, this invites one-solution thinking based in unsubstantiated expectations of transformative technological innovations in the distant future. The third problem concerns the mismatch between, on the one hand, the multiple temporalities and extending durations of climate action and, on the other, the temporal flatness and presentism implicit in the concept of crisis.

This workshop therefore posits that the growing engagement in late-modern societies with increasingly conflicted timescapes and matters of temporal injustice not only reflects the ‘climate crisis’, but also a far-reaching ‘crisis’ of modern temporality itself. It is against this critical backdrop that the workshop sets out to explore a different set of temporalities currently emerging from the historical experience of anthropogenic climate change.

 Find more information at SCAS' website .

The workshop is by invitation only.

Date: 13 Oct 2025 – to 15 Oct 2025