Sedimented Crises.
Layered Histories, Affect, and the Embodied Landscapes of Social Disruption

Contemporary social science frequently treats crises as sudden, isolated disruptions to an otherwise stable social order. This workshop challenges this perspective by approaching crises as multi-layered historical assemblages whose effects become sedimented and linger in bodies, social relations, and material environments. Ongoing socio-political crises take shape in and through bodies, turning them into living archives in which past struggles reverberate, present crises are negotiated, and possible futures begin to emerge. Contemporary crises and disruptions intersect with long-standing histories of colonial trauma, economic marginalization, displacement, and ecological degradation, giving rise to affective experiences that are multiple, layered, and sometimes contradictory.

The affects these histories and their contemporary reverberations evoke may echo across time, reinforce or enter into tension with one another, and produce experiences of disorientation, exhaustion, or collapse. Yet they may also give rise to new orientations, practices of repair, and modalities of living with, transforming, or overcoming crisis. How, then, can we access and understand these embodied and often unspoken dynamics of crisis? Both academic and artistic practices engage in research as a means of generating knowledge, yet they often differ in what they understand research to be, how they approach embodied experience, and what forms of expression and representation they consider capable of making affective dynamics perceptible. The workshop takes these differences as a productive starting point for exploring how artistic, ethnographic, and somatic modes of inquiry can speak to and transform one another.

Bringing together theoretical, methodological, and empirical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities with artistic and somatic practices, this interactive workshop explores how crises are affectively embodied, expressed, and negotiated across temporal and spatial scales. It asks how macro-historical crises become entangled with micro-somatic experiences, how multiple affects emerge, resonate, and shift in relation to one another, and how their often unspoken or not-yet-articulated dimensions can be approached through different modes of inquiry.

Beyond academic critique, the primary goal of this workshop is to foster a collaborative space where participants can collectively rethink the histories and futures of crisis intervention. Combining academic panel discussions with hands-on practical workshops, it invites academics, artists, and practitioners to work alongside one another and to experiment with different ways of sensing, tracing, expressing, and representing affective experiences of intersecting crises. Situated at the intersection of art and academia, the workshop explores how creative and somatic practices can expand scholarly inquiry, how conceptual and ethnographic perspectives can enter into dialogue with artistic research, and what new forms of knowledge may emerge from their encounter.