Gradient of problematizations
a proposal for the study of crisis and fragilities of social life
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https://doi.org/10.20336/rbs.1086Keywords:
crisis, critique, problematizationAbstract
The word “crisis” is part of the vocabulary of the contemporary world and is at the center of a growing literature in the Social Sciences, sometimes accompanied by the correlative “critique”. The binomial crisis and critique points to a tension between, on the one hand, the use of “crisis” as a discursive device that justifies interventions by powerful groups, reinforcing patterns of inequality and hierarchies, and on the other hand, as an analytical tool to describe and “critique” objective aspects of historical reality. In addition, crisis sometimes appears as a descriptor of large-scale events (economic, political and institutional crises), sometimes linked to more intimate events (existential, mid-life or health crises), sometimes as an occasion for sociological criticism, sometimes as the object of that criticism. In this article, I discuss and delimit the concept of crisis in a sociology of problems and problematizations. To this end, I focus on everyday life as the concrete place where macro and micro, objective and subjective aspects of crises come together in a gradient of problematizations. Finally, I argue in favor of sociology as a critical exercise in imaginative translation.
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