After the Hope: Community Responses to Polycrisis between Adaptation and Rupture

The COVID-19 pandemic was, for a brief moment, widely imagined as a portal: a rupture significant enough to force a reordering of priorities, a "build back better" moment in which mutual aid networks, degrowth proposals, and renewed appreciation for care work seemed to point toward a more just post-pandemic order. Several years on, this hope reads as largely unrealized. Pre-pandemic structures reasserted themselves with remarkable speed, and the language of transformation was quietly absorbed into business-as-usual. Instead of a single crisis followed by recovery, we have settled into permanent overlapping crises – economic, ecological, geopolitical, democratic – to the point where polycrisis has stopped functioning as an alarm and become an ambient condition, met with fatigue rather than mobilization. This session asks what communities do under these conditions, and what their responses do to the system whose failures they are trying to address. We are interested in the full range of community responses: initiatives that function as shock absorbers, stabilizing arrangements and absorbing costs in ways that reduce pressure for deeper reform; initiatives that use local organizing as leverage for institutional change, translating mutual aid into coalitions and policy demands; and initiatives that refuse engagement altogether, building parallel structures outside the system they no longer trust to reform. We want to take seriously both the achievements and limits of these responses: what new arrangements are genuinely being prefigured at the community level, and why promising local alternatives struggle to scale or outlast the conditions that produced them.