Conjuring the crisis-imaginary: critical discourse analysis and auto-ethnographic reflections on the Canadian Red Cross

Journal article

The term crisis is used variously to describe the current social, political, and economic climate. However, the temporal implications of the concept itself have not been explored. This project uses affective scholarship as a methodological approach to interrogate the conceptual gaps within crisis and temporality by exploring the crisis-imaginary as it is constructed through the language, affects, and images. The Canadian Red Cross and its various crisis- operations during the COVID-19 pandemic become a case study into the crisis- imaginary. Drawing on both an auto-ethnographic approach and a critical discourse analysis of the CRC's language, images, and the narratives used within promotional materials and training manuals. The crisis-imaginary can be thought of as an apparatus that engenders subjectivities that are occupied by a linear conception of time, whereas the sensorial and embodied experience of crisis signals a more complex temporal relationship. The crisis-imaginary creates certain subjectivities and temporalities that overshadow the lived experience and realities of crisis. The disjuncture between the narratives of the crisis- imaginary and the affective experience of it comes to have a haunting affect. Through language, images, and affects The crisis-imaginary both haunts and structures our relationship to temporality. The everyday becomes haunted by the crisis-imaginary when the supposed ends to crisis narratives never present or manifest themselves. Understanding the temporal complexities embedded in the crisis-imaginary invites us to find time and engage with the pantemporal dimensions that evade rational explanations and logic.

Authors: Wong-Mersereau, CMY

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 262-281
• Publication date: 2023-12-19
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-r5evbqnnv
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: affect critical discourse analysis; temporality; JASO; hauntology; crisis-imaginary