Framing the Crisis: COVID-19

What are the stakes of crisis”? While abundant scholarship attempts to explain crises, there is a surprising lack of attention to the concept of crisis itself. I ask how the term crisis functions as a blind spot in the production of knowledge. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to be the most obvious case of a crisis. But we need to ask foundational questions about the constitution of “the crisis” as an event. How is crisis constituted as something that we act upon? This question is important not merely for semantic or discursive reasons. Foundational questions about the constitution of the pandemic as a crisis are significant because this framing results in material consequences for various communities. In other words, answers to these questions help us to consider the effects of the claim to crisis. Ultimately, they force us to examine the consequences of positing human security in terms of biological security as opposed to public welfare.