A world in crisis: wildfires as examples of the climate crisis in the BBC News documentary looking at Heatwaves: The New Normal?

In this second podcast, David and Elke are looking at Governance in Crisis – as governance that is troubled but also governance in a period of crisis. We examine the issue of crisis itself and what solutions there may be (can we learn from history, could Confucianism teach us anything?). But we also ponder some of the issues that remain central problems in our understanding of governance in crisis. Our key argument is that as academics we perhaps need to intervene in discourses that label algorithms as machine-led and hence neutral, in understandings of individual vs social responsibilities etc. We speak about the need for regulation as a pushback against interests by a small number of people and groups that are interconnected, but that this regulation needs to move away from neoliberal understandings of benefits as economic and individual, etc. Some of this will be very obvious to many of us, but perhaps our call to action will fall on open ears?

Listen here.

 

David Levente Palatinus is Associate Professor in Media and Cultural Studies at the Department of English at the University of Trnava. He also has a secondment as Assistant Professor at the English Department of Technical University of Liberec. In 2017 he set up the Anthropocene Media Lab which now functions as an inter-institutional hub for collaborations and work in the fields of media and Anthropocene studies. David’s research moves between and across digital media and cultural theory, and he has worked and written on violence in serial culture, medicine and autopsy, autoimmunity and war, and digital subjectivity in the Anthropocene.

Elke Weissmann is Reader in Film and Television at Edge Hill University. Her books include Transnational Television Drama (Palgrave) and the edited collection Renewing Feminisms (I.B.Tauris) with Helen Thornham. She is an ECREA editor for Critical Studies in Television. She is currently working on a book on national industries in the transnational world of global high-end drama. She migrated to the UK in 2002 after realising that German television was as bad as she remembered.

 

References

You can watch “‘A new age of shamelessness’ | Slavoj Žižek on Trump, authoritarians and ‘the new left'” on BBC Newsnight here, and Jacques Derrida on l’avenir (from the documentary Derrida, 2002, dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman) here.