A deep and thought-provoking examination of crisis politics and their implications for power and marginalization in the United States.
From the climate crisis to the opioid crisis to the Coronavirus crisis, the language of crisis is everywhere around us and ubiquitous in contemporary American politics and policymaking. But for every problem that political actors describe as a crisis, there are myriad other equally serious ones that are not described in this way. Why has the term crisis been associated with some problems but not others? What has crisis come to mean, and what work does it do?
In When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People, Dara Z. Strolovitch brings a critical eye to the taken-for-granted political vernacular of crisis. Using systematic analyses to trace the evolution of the use of the term crisis by both political elites and outsiders, Strolovitch unpacks the idea of “crisis” in contemporary politics and demonstrates that crisis is itself an operation of politics. She shows that racial justice activists innovated the language of crisis in an effort to transform racism from something understood as natural and intractable and to cast it instead as a policy problem that could be remedied. Dominant political actors later seized on the language of crisis to compel the use of state power, but often in ways that compounded rather than alleviated inequality and injustice. In this eye-opening and important book, Strolovitch demonstrates that understanding crisis politics is key to understanding the politics of racial, gender, and class inequalities in the early twenty-first century.
By:
Prof. Dara Z. Strolovitch
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 229mm,
Width: 152mm,
Spine: 30mm
Weight: 594g
ISBN: 9780226798813
ISBN 10: 022679881X
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 28 September 2023
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Figures List of Tables List of Abbreviations and Acronyms Acknowledgments Introduction. Crisis Politics Part I Crisis and Non-Crisis in American Politics Chapter 1 Crisis as a Political Keyword Chapter 2 What We Talk about When We Talk about Crisis Chapter 3 Regressions, Reversals, and Red Herrings Part II Foreclosure Crises and Non-Crises Chapter 4 When Does a Crisis Begin? Chapter 5 How to Semantically Mask a Crisis Conclusion and Epilogue. Will These Crises Go to Waste? Appendices. Overview of Sources and Methods A Working with Textual Data: Caveats and Considerations B Sources, Methods, and Coding Protocols C List of Main Sources of Data and Evidence D Supplementary Figures and Tables Notes Bibliography Index
Dara Z. Strolovitch is professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, American studies, and political science at Yale University, and she is coeditor of the American Political Science Review. She is the author of Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews for When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People: Race, Gender, and What Makes a Crisis in America
“Strolovitch conducts an exhaustive rhetorical analysis of crisis in well-selected print sources that incorporate both media and government, carving out distinctive territory in its direct focus on the rhetoric of crisis in politics.” -- Julie Novkov | University at Albany, SUNY
