The placing and power of men and masculinities in the polycrisis

Crisis and “crisis talk” (Hearn and Roberts, 1976) appear to be everywhere, in economic crisis, fiscal crisis, energy crisis, climate crisis, political crisis, migration crisis, AI crisis, pandemic crisis. The word, and the concept of, crisis may indeed seem over-used (Roitman, 2014, p. 5), sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, with disasters, tipping points, catastrophes, and major transformations, whether in everyday, political or academic discourse. But, regardless of that, the fact is the global environment has become far more turbulent with the onset of polycrisis (Demirović and Maihofer, 2024; Greig, 2024). Moreover, Roitman (2014, pp. 8, 39) reminds us that “crisis and critique are cognates … [that] crisis is the basis of social and critical theory”, arguing that “[c]risis is a blind spot that enables the production of knowledge”. Likewise, critique and polycrisis – the contemporary and future combination of multiple global crises – are in a close, perhaps reciprocal, knowledge relation. The polycrisis is certainly not neutral, in its causes or effects, and neither is critique.