Proposal deadline: 14 December 2026
Deadline for submission of full contributions: 29 January 2027
Prospective publication: Winter/spring 2027
Series editor: Shannon Stunden Bower
History has a particular relationship with crisis. In some areas of the world, the subdiscipline of environmental history took on additional power and coherence partially in response to late 20th century concern about the crisis of environmental degradation.[1] In Canada, historians from within and beyond the field of environmental history have participated in discussions about what it means to do history amid the global crisis of climate change.[2] In the last few years, the notion of polycrisis has been picked up by some historically-oriented scholars as a means to underline the complexities and complications inherent in multidimensional crises.[3] Just recently, Helge Jodheim examined the work – both intellectual and material – done by the concept of crisis.[4]
Moments of crisis might be particularly interesting to historians and historically-oriented scholars from across a range of subdisciplines and fields because of the association between crisis and change. Whether manifest in relation to an individual, a community, a population, or some other entity, crises often serve as catalysts to transformations of various sorts. Recognizing this, it might perhaps be continuity – rather than change – that is the more remarkable in the face of crisis.
Titled “Continuity through Crisis,” this blog series aims to profile some of the creative and strategic efforts made by historical actors to foster or safeguard some valued dimension of their practices, identities, experiences, or contexts, even in the face of crisis-level disruption. Contributors are invited to define both crisis and continuity on their own terms and in ways that make sense in relation to the actors under study. Contributors might consider:
- particular practices that have helped foster continuity over time, across space, or amid challenges;
- efforts at sustaining continuity through experiences of migration or within diasporic communities;
- the ways in which meanings or understandings of the notion of continuity are historically constructed, perhaps even themselves subject to change; the particular challenges to safeguarding continuity amid compounding crises or polycrisis;
- how the contexts for and specificities of particular crises might affect practices aimed at cultivating continuity;
- how the notion of continuity might be useful in considering non-human actors or processes manifest at very large or very small scales.
