Living through Precarious Times: Discursive Practices of Hope, Agency and Resistance

Across the globe, people increasingly live under conditions shaped by war, displacement, climate disruption, democratic erosion, economic insecurity, and widening inequalities. While such developments are often analysed as large-scale social crises, less attention has been paid to how people navigate these conditions in everyday life.

This session approaches crisis not merely as a structural condition but as something that people actively respond to, negotiate, and make sense of through discourse and interaction. Drawing on approaches that conceptualise discourse as both social practice and situated social action (e.g., Fairclough, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987), the session explores how hope, agency, and resistance are produced, negotiated, and contested in everyday, institutional, and public settings. We particularly welcome empirically grounded studies that examine how people maintain possibilities for action, construct meaningful futures, challenge constraints, and sustain social life under conditions of uncertainty and disruption.

Contributions from a range of empirical contexts are encouraged, including welfare institutions, healthcare, education, migration, activism, community organising, and other settings where people live through and respond to turbulent social conditions. Submissions may include different methodologies, such as analyses of interaction, discourse, narratives, and ethnomethodology, as well as related approaches concerned with language, communication, and social action in everyday and institutional life.