Crisis and Transformation

What time is it? What world are we living in? Is it continuous with the world of the 19th and 20th centuries, or has there been a radical break? This episode is devoted to these questions, specifically in relation to the meaning of crisis and transformation. Since the financial crisis of 2007/2008, there has been a continuous series of crises that have been felt globally. Everyone talks about crisis all the time: economic crisis, ecological crisis, polycrisis, care crisis, legitimacy crisis. But what if the concept of crisis itself is in crisis? Is there a way to diagnose the present crises and to analyze transformative potentials without using outdated conceptual schemes? To get into this deeper, Jacob Blumenfeld speaks with Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates about crises, blockages, transformation and social struggles today. The occasion for this discussion is the Crisis and Transformation conference that took place at the Grimm-Zentrum, Humboldt University Berlin, from June 4-5, 2026, with speakers including Adam Tooze, Isabella Weber, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Maeve Cooke, Silke van Dyk, Philipp Staab, Henrike Kohpeiß, Jay Bernstein, Debaditya Bhattacharya, Manuela Bojadžijev, Maeve Cooke, Rodrigo Cordero, Stephan Lessenich, Isette Schuhmacher, Joseph Tainter, Markus Wissen, and Joseph Vogl. The episode discusses and plays numerous clips from the event, but for the full audio of the panels, please see the conference web page. Thanks to Constantin Hühn for sound recording and Jürg Meister for sound editing.