Discussion | Polycrisis and the Problem of Preparedness

Today, at the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 outbreak, the threat of cascading crises looms large. Climate catastrophe. Infectious disease. Runaway artificial intelligence. New hazards that stretch our political imagination, and challenge our capacity to plan. In this conversation, Andrew Lakoff (author of Planning for the Wrong Pandemic), Eric Klinenberg (author of 2020), and moderator Amy Zhang (author of Circular Ecologies) will explore what we’ve learned, and failed to learn, from the last pandemic, and discuss the problem of preparedness in an age of polycrisis.

Andrew Lakoff is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at USC, where he also directs the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. His books include Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge, 2006), Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (University of California Press, 2017),  The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (with Stephen J. Collier) (Princeton University Press, 2021), and Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge (Polity, 2024).

Eric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. His most recent book is 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, and his other books include Heat Wave, Fighting for Air, Going Solo, and Palaces for the People.

Amy Zhang is an anthropologist and political ecologist whose research investigates environment, technology, labor, and urban life. Her first book Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2024) examines the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize China’s urban waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University.