Call for Papers for York Graduate and Early Careers Conference
From Crisis to the Renewal of Community: Progress, Judgement, and the Return of History
20th-21st July 2026
The rhetoric of community intensifies in times of crisis. Moments of foundational political reflection are born from a sense that what was once a shared comprehension has begun to falter, that inherited certainties have failed, demanding reflection and renewal. Crisis is both a language of rupture between the past and present, and the promise of a new beginning towards an imagined and hopeful future. This call invites contributions that explore how crises, social, political, ecological or technological, transform and reconstitute the communal dimension of human life, and how such moments prompt renewed thinking about the nature of community itself.
The word crisis originates from the Greek verb krinó: to distinguish, choose, judge, dispute, or fight. It here encompasses both the passage from dispute to decision and the decision itself that constitutes civic community. With the advent of Christianity, crisis took on an eschatological significance – the Last Judgement as the final irrevocable decision of the divine. In doing so, crisis became understood as the foundation of historical time itself. Nowhere is this idea made more central to political thought than in the work of Reinhardt Koselleck, who saw modernity as the acceleration of historical time to a period defined by perpetual crisis. Despite late-twentieth-century assertions that Western elites had conquered these rhythms, society’s thirst for change has since delivered a thorough rebuke.
Community breakdown has stimulated the greatest thinkers to explore how society might be renewed, from Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, through Edmund Burke and Karl Marx, to Judith Shklar and the late Alasdair MacIntyre. As we live through a period characterised by local, national and international societal fractures, with technological advances forging new modes of human interaction, political thinkers must strive for new ways to understand the nature of these ruptures and seek paths for renewal. As Hannah Arendt reminds us, ‘a crisis becomes a disaster only when we respond to it with preformed judgments.’
This conference will explore the breakdown and reconstitution of communities across history and throughout the globe, whether case studies or in the abstract. We welcome submissions from graduates, postgraduates and early career scholars in the fields of History, International Relations, Politics and Philosophy. Submissions are invited to address topics such as the nature and position of communal ideology, how societies (re)form, how shifting interactions across space necessitate a redrawing of the nature of community, and the path to establishing new mechanisms of decision-making within societies.
Keynotes: Annabel Brett (University of Cambridge), and Jon Parkin (University of Oxford).
From Crisis to the Renewal of Community welcomes proposals (up to 250 words) for 20-minute papers, to be submitted via the submissions portal on the website or by email to crisisandcommunity@gmail.com by 30 April, together with a short bio.
Website: https://crisisandcommunity.wordpress.com/
