Crises and Social Transformation in Modern Democracies [Seminar]

«Crisis» has become part of everyday social and political vocabulary these days. Economic crises (in the financial and real economy, in the fiscal affairs of states) affect societies. Political crises often result in the questioning of democratic institutions and methods of governance and, sometimes, the rise of authoritarian political forces. The prolonged crisis of the welfare state is being felt in the fields of health, education and social security on the basis of globalization and liberalization and privatization policies in recent decades. The refugee crisis continues to have dramatic consequences for mobile populations and to push for policies that divide societies. Public health crises are caused by epidemiological causes and spread on a planetary scale. At the same time, an increasingly visible ecological crisis is escalating on the basis of the continuous overexploitation of natural resources, while other individual crises (e.g. housing on the basis of the sharing economy) connect the local with the global level. The Seminar examines the causes and social consequences of individual crises. What consequences do crises have on modern societies, their economic and political life and their democracies? How are social institutions as well as individual, labor and social rights affected by crises? Can we, with the tools of political sociology, compare the causes, consequences and political management of current crises in different countries? Can we compare the crises of the present with past major crises in the history of the industrial era? With what rhetorics and what kind of arguments is the management of crises invested? What kind of social, institutional and class transformations are caused? How are crises dealt with by societies? These questions concern the Seminar, and it seeks to delve deeper into them.