Readers' Forum: Catastrophe and Its Discontents

The three short pieces assembled here emerged from the esc Roundtable at Congress in 2019. My hope, here realized, was that the roundtable would spark some thinking about how we narrate crisis, catastrophe, and cataclysm, and how our discipline, broadly speaking, might respond to these modes of narration. Given the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, our need to think about what we, as scholars and citizens, can do to critique and to intervene in the mounting crises that afflict the planet and our politics has grown even more urgent. As the essays by Julia Wright, Leif Schenstead-Harris, and David Janzen show, interventions in catastrophe and crisis are governed both by the vicissitudes of language, by how it defines, defies, denies, and excludes, and by the institutional and discursive lures that seek to ensnare us in the plague ship of the status quo.