Crisis seems to be a pervasive feature of our time. In a globalised world, also the complexity of crises seems to increase as they transgress physical but also sectoral boundaries, which leads to the widely-shared diagnosis of “transboundary crises” in the crisis research field. While the term crisis has been used by economic geographers with increasing frequency in the past few years, analytical approaches to “crisis” are still at the beginning.
An analytical understanding is necessary that seeks to identify crucial features that crises in different empirical settings have in common. While the temporal implications of crisis, such as time pressure, are already well studied, the decisive role of geographic categories, such as territory or networks, in studying crisis is still lacking. Moreover, coping with crisis requires collective action by various actors. This entails specific and very interesting questions of coordination, collaboration and (multi-level) governance in crises. However, apart from mere crisis management, learning from crisis and enhanced resilience towards future disruptions is central. Here questions arise whether general lessons can be drawn from highly specific crisis contexts or not.
A fast-growing field of fascinating research on crisis phenomena opens up at the intersection of economic geography and management and organization studies. In this session, we explore the emerging geographies of organizing in and for crisis. We invite researchers from economic geography and beyond to submit proposals that address theoretical, empirical and methodological challenges of studying the complexity of crises from various perspectives. Submissions might include but are not limited to: