Lecture Series: Society in Transformation

Crisis is a notoriously vague and ambiguous concept. Despite its widespread use in academic disciplines, there is no general consensus on the concept of crisis, neither across the various research areas nor within individual fields of study. Today’s dominant public discourse of crisis, conveying the idea that possibly every aspect of our life is in crisis, only further contributes to the ambiguity of the term. Nevertheless, the concept of crisis seems to capture something that other related concepts (such as conflict, revolution or catastrophe) fail to fully grasp.

This lecture proposes that in order to gain clarity about the concept of crisis, we need to ask what it means to be in crisis. By investigating what it means to be in crisis, we also come to understand why the concept of crisis may appear vague and ambiguous.

Wacyl Azzouz studied sociology, social and political theory and philosophy in Zurich, Innsbruck, Bucharest and Tübingen. In 2021 he completed his doctorate on Adorno’s aesthetics at the eikones Graduate School (Basel). Since 2021, he has been a postdoc researcher at the SNF-funded research project “Krise und Handlungsmöglichkeit” at the University of Basel. His main areas of interest are aesthetics, critical theory, social philosophy and political philosophy.