1 Global Discourse • vol XX • no XX • 1–5 © Bristol University Press 2022 • Online ISSN 2043-7897 https://doi.org/10.1332/204378921X16354481297194 Special Issue: Critical Explorations of Crisis: Politics, Precariousness, and Potentialities RESEARCH Preface: crisis as experience and politics Didier Fassin, dfassin@ias.edu Institute for Advanced Study, USA In the tradition of Koselleck, crisis has often been approached as an idea or as a narrative, but less research has been conducted on how people produce, respond to, and live through crises. Most of the articles of the present issue explore this perspective, with its dual dimension of experience and politics. In line with it, the present article proposes an analysis of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic through the questions of the rupture in time, the state of exception and the uncovering of inequalities. Key words crisis • temporality • exception • inequality • pandemic To cite this article: Fassin, D. (2022) Preface: crisis as experience and politics, Global Discourse, XX(XX): 1–5, DOI: 10.1332/204378921X16354481297194 At the end of his pioneering article on crisis, Reinhart Koselleck (2006 [1972]: 399) makes a disillusioned comment: ‘The concept of crisis, which once had the power to pose unavoidable, harsh and non-negotiable alternatives, has been transformed to ft uncertainties of whatever might be favored at a given moment.’ Not only does he dislike the ‘enormous quantitative expansion in the variety of meanings attached to the concept of crisis’, but he discredits it for the ‘few corresponding gains in either clarity or precision’. In line with his critical approach, there has been a literature treating crisis as an idea (Roitman, 2013) or as a narrative (Seeger and Sellnow, 2016), taking outsiders’ perspectives, and therefore distancing itself from actual critical situations. It is a useful stance, but there is a symmetrical option generally based on ethnography, examining ‘what insiders see in situations designated as crises, how they apprehend them, how they participate in them and how they respond to them’ (Fassin and Honneth, 2022: 2), in sum taking seriously how people produce crises and how they live through them. This is the standpoint adopted by most authors in this special issue on ‘Crisis’. It is developed via a series of fascinating articles on: the ordinary yet grave concerns of female Vietnamese workers; the exposure of women to gang violence in South Africa; the drift of young unemployed Guinea-Bissauan migrants towards drug trafcking; the humanitarian reception in Italy of child victims of nuclear disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima; and the ambiguous production of transnational Unauthenticated | Downloaded 05/17/22 05:58 AM UTC