Slow emergencies: Temporality and the racialized biopolitics of emergency governance

Abstract

How lives are governed through emergency is a critical issue for our time. In this paper, we build on scholarship on this issue by developing the concept of ‘slow emergencies’. We do so to attune to situations of harm that call into question what forms of life can and should be secured by apparatuses of emergency governance. Through drawing together work on emergency and on racialization, we define ‘slow emergencies’ as situations marked by a) attritional lethality; b) imperceptibility; c) the foreclosure of the capacity to become otherwise; d) emergency claims. We conclude with a call to reclaim ‘emergency’.

The past shall not begin: Frozen seeds, extended presents and the politics of reversibility

“…For Anderson, the endemical is a stretched temporal state in which the emergence of events is still possible, but does not end the duration of the endemic. For Luhmann, however, this entanglement is not, as Anderson sees it, a particular feature of the declaration of the state of emergency (see also Anderson et al, 2019: 14) but rather constitutive of the temporality of all social practices.…”

Elemental worlds: Specificities, exposures, alchemies

“…As the Covid-19 pandemic transitions from an urgent to a slower but no less violent or racialized emergency (Anderson et al, 2019), elemental milieus will become the focus for new and intensified forms of biopolitical and necro-political techniques and technologies that monitor and modify their molecular composition through many forms of mediation. Their composition will generate a range of responses, including diverse forms of 'resigned activism' (Lora-Wainwright, 2017) for living and weathering exposures to different worlds.…”

Anthropocene islands: There are only islands after the end of the world

“…Resilience has without doubt become the analytical field through which islands have emerged as central to less modern, 'command-and-control', 'topdown', framings of governance, with linear thinking about progress and sustainability (Baldacchino, 2018;Kelman, 2018). In the Anthropocene, Resilience has emerged as the key conceptual innovation, focusing upon governance as the art of adaptation or of adaptive change in relation to changing circumstances (Anderson et al, 2019;Chandler and Coaffee, 2016;Grove, 2018;Pugh, 2014;Wakefield, 2020). At the ontological level, Resilience approaches could be understood as reflecting a shift towards tapping into the immanent powers of complex adaptive systems.…”