Crisis beyond the exceptional: the latent, everyday nature of the crisis perpetual

We are surrounded by declarations of crises, from climate to housing, debt and beyond. Crisis is everywhere and yet it remains exceptional. A crisis is imagined as a call to action, a repudiation of the old system, promising change if only the moment can be seized. And yet, as Roitman (2014) argues, crisis declarations generally reinforce the status quo. Building on this insight, I argue that ‘fixing’ a crisis—configured as exceptional—involves pushing the crisis down to and atomizing it across vulnerable populations, further increasing precarity. This paper delves into crisis from this perspective. Not from the macro scale of the state, the economy, or the global, but from the everyday crises that are an ever‐lurking and constant reality for so many living in conditions of poverty, violence and exclusion. Asking how these myriad, hidden crises relate to the crisis exceptional, I argue that their constant reproduction is essential to staving off broader economic and social crises and in reasserting the status quo when such broader crises can no longer be contained. In this way, crisis originates not from the macro scale, at which we usually think of crisis, but from the proliferation of everyday crises across vulnerable populations.