Amber Jacobs / Mareike Kleine / Andy Wilson

This event was jointly organised with Big Ideas

7.30 – 9pm | Wednesday 5 May 2010
The Counting House, 50 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3PD

Speakers
Amber Jacobs, Psychosocial theorist
Mareike Kleine, Political Scientist
Andy Wilson, Director of L-Shift

Chair
Simon Glendinning, Director of the Forum for European Philosophy

While having its roots in political contexts of decision or decisive judgement in Greek antiquity, up until the seventeenth century the term “crisis” was primarily used in a medical diagnosis, referring to a traumatic condition of the human body. Subsequently its use widened to include once more phenomena in politics, but also in economics, psychology and religion. Crisis today has meaning in almost every aspect of life. Is this a co-incidence or are these phenomena related in some fundamental way? It is hard to imagine a social crisis without psychological expression. But it is equally hard to imagine a psychological crisis without social roots. Is every social crisis a psycho-social one? And is every psychological crisis a psycho-social crisis too? To put it in a way which draws on its long use in medicine, is every crisis of the body a crisis of the body politic? In this event we explored the realities and relations of the crises in our lives.