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In Case of Emergency: Catastrophe, Climate, and Capitalism
November 5–7, 2026When we trace the genealogy of crisis, it can seem as if we’ve always been surrounded by catastrophe. Different factions of the ruling class tell us that we need to be prepared, but also that preparation may be fruitless. Crises shift and expand, strengthening their hold on us through their very instability. The state of emergency, after all, “is not the exception but the rule,” as Walter Benjamin theorized; it is not a single event but what Lauren Berlant called a norm “embedded” in the everyday. In the zones of crisis and in daily life, the emergency overwhelms the senses, requiring constant self-governance and limiting our political imagination.
The urgent threat of climate change, though often disavowed, is at the center of today’s general atmosphere of crisis. But so far, discourses of risk and emergency have mostly been a boon for the racist right and anti-democratic technocrats, rather than contributing to a genuine project of planetary stewardship.
The quest for “energy sovereignty” has unleashed a wave of extractive interventions in the Global South amid the collapse of the postwar international order, creating new sacrifice zones and colonial resource frontiers. Frustrated by electoral institutions’ inability to deliver systemic transformation, some environmentalists have embraced climate doomerism or the technosolutionism of geoengineering; meanwhile, states are developing new techniques of biopolitical management and military repression for a world of scarcity. None of this has halted the earth system’s destabilization, an environmental and political process that embeds slow, uneven, and racialized forms of ecological violence in everyday life. Walls hold back displaced people and rising seas. Crops fail, biodiversity plummets, and streams run dry. As heat takes its toll on agricultural laborers’ bodies, urbanites adjust to smoggy summers.
Unlike the “fevered immediacy that governs the society of the catastrophe-as-spectacle,” Rob Nixon writes, this unspectacular “slow violence” is dispersed over time and space. With the sirens blaring, it is easy to miss the ways in which the ideology of emergency warps our cultural production and social relations, obscuring the slow violence of climate change as well as the most pressing contradictions of capitalism today. How might we map the cartography of crisis? In doing so, might we open space for alternative ways of thinking and living within and against crisis? Can we hold crisis at bay long enough to bring about a “real state of emergency,” as Benjamin says is our task?
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 5
Social Science Research Building 122
6:00–7:30pm
Keynote
Jason W. Moore
“The Climate-Class Conjuncture, or, the Worldwide Class Struggle in the Web of Life”
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6
Foster 107
10:00–10:30am
Breakfast
10:30am–12:00pm
Welcome remarks
Contested Commons
Myles André Bonadie, Yale University
“Trouble Comes Triple: Race, Place, and Performance in the Anti-black Climate”
Kwolanne Felix, New York University
“The Crisis of Southern Commons: South Carolina 1865–1882”
Sohini Sengupta, University of Chicago
“Performing Catastrophe: Scarcity and the Poetics of Crisis in Indian Leftist Theater”
Discussant: Victoria Saramago
12:00–1:00pm
Lunch
1:00–2:30pm
Toxic Temporalities
Aurore Boutet, Sorbonne University/University of Chicago
“‘That Death on the Wall’: The Cyclical (Re)Discovery of Chicago’s Long Lead Crisis”
Ben Jacob, Rutgers University
“Repeal the Twentieth Century: Cheap Oil, Crisis Ecologies and the Making of Guyana’s 1999 Petroleum Agreement”
Madeline Turner, Stanford University
“Toxic Fertility: Living and Dying with Moroccan Soil”
Kylie Walters, Northwestern University
“The Plastic Picture Window: Promoting Petrochemical Environmentalism”
Discussant: Jennifer Scappettone
2:30–2:45pm
Break
2:45–4:15pm
(De)valuing Disaster
Nathan Deschamps, Stanford University
“The Visible Hands: Economic Evil and the Cartography of Crisis in Early Modern Germany”
Sujin Jung, Indiana University Bloomington
“Keeping Coral Alive as Art: Bioart and Infrastructures of Emergency”
Dolma Ombadykow, Yale University
“Bodily Survival for Export: Homeostasis, Fatigue, and the National Body, 1899–1945”
Maya Sibul, University of Chicago
“Coming to Account-Ability: On Labor, Crisis, and Redress in Rukeyser’s Documentary Poetics”
Discussant: Joseph Masco
4:15–4:30pm
Break
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Cobb 306
4:30–6:30pm
Film screenings and pizza
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7
Foster 107
10:00–10:30am
Breakfast
10:30am–12:00pm
Extreme Environments
Stella Oyekanmi, Brown University
“Waiting on Paper: Paperwork and the Temporal Governance of Disaster in Ibadan, Southwestern Nigeria”
Jorge Palacios, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“Escape Velocity: Spaceflight, Alienation, and the Politics of Planetary Crisis”
Moe Romanoff, Northwestern University
“Crisis of Extinction, Crisis of Mediation: Mammoth Tusk Hunting and Its Aesthetic Afterlives across the Sino-Siberian Borderlands”
Bradley Verhelle, University of Chicago
“Ghost Herds: Imagining Catastrophe and Rural Environmental Justice at the Seneca Army Depot”
Discussant: Elizabeth Chatterjee
12:00–1:30pm
Lunch
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Social Science Research Building 122
1:30–2:30pm
Poetry reading
Daniel Borzutzky
Mónica de la Torre
Joyelle McSweeney
2:30–3:00pm
Break
3:00–4:30pm
Keynote
Gökçe Günel
“Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations”
4:30–5:30pm
Reception
Jason W. Moore: The Climate-Class Conjuncture, or, the Worldwide Class Struggle in the Web of Life
You might think the weather of distant centuries has little to tell us about today’s climate crisis and its politics. That would be a mistake. In this lecture, I show how climate history is a constitutive moment of class societies over the very longue durée. Eschewing climate determinism and social reductionism, this conception of climate and class opens a new vista on the history of class society and its class-metabolic orders. My organizing concept is the climate-class conjuncture: turning points at which geophysical processes (non-dialectical antagonisms) – such volcanism, solar cycles, oceanic oscillations – converge with the class-metabolic antagonisms within and between distinctive modes of production. To be sure, climate doesn’t make history. It influences modes of production by acting on (and through) their regimes of surplus labor – in capitalism, the worldwide law of value and its regimes of surplus value. This is a class-metabolic dynamic, and it cuts to the heart of class power, because every ruling class rests its dominion on a particular form of surplus labor. Destabilize that labor-metabolic bases of that form, and you destabilize the rulers. Hence the pattern: “good” climate favors ruling-class offensives against the direct producers; “bad” climate fractures elites, squeezes their surplus, and pushes together the direct producers. I trace this pattern through successive climate-class conjunctures: the Bronze Age crisis, the crisis of the Roman West, the crisis of feudalism, the long cold seventeenth century, and the Dalton-Laki fissure of 1783–1820. Each clarifies the present. For if bad climate is bad for ruling classes, then the unfolding planetary crisis is not catastrophe — but opportunity — for the proletarian forces.
Gökçe Günel: Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations
If the state of emergency is not the exception but the rule, how do people worldwide acknowledge, experience, or help perpetuate conditions of catastrophe? This talk traces the emergence of Ayşegül Sultan, a Turkish-built floating power plant in Ghana’s Tema fishing harbor. Using this ship-cum-generator as a lens, I advance a broader argument about global energy politics, critiquing the dominant, unilinear narrative of “energy transition,” which posits the possibility of substituting fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Instead, ethnographic data from Turkey and Ghana reveal a landscape of accumulation, where various types of infrastructure—hydroelectric, heavy fuel oil, natural gas, and solar—layer upon one another. This all-of-the-above approach relies upon and reproduces what I call “technologies of deferral,” such as the floating power plant at the center of the talk, which are perceived as temporary stopgaps but often become semi-permanent fixtures. Overall, the talk highlights the thick geopolitical and geoeconomic connections between Turkey and African countries, demonstrating how South-South relations reshape global energy networks and vice versa, thereby mapping an emergent cartography of crisis.
Organized by Aditi Kini, Tadhg Larabee, Ernest Lee, and Yolian Ogbu in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and with support from the Franke Institute for the Humanities; the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization; the Committee on Social Thought; the Department of Anthropology; the Department of English; the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; the Department of Cinema and Media Studies; the Committee on Southern Asian Studies; the Chicago Center on Democracy; and the Shapiro Initiative on Environment and Society.
This event is free and open to the public, and registration is recommended. Please email us at ccct@uchicago.edu if you require any accommodations to enable your full participation.
Poster illustration: xoph rodrigo
