In early February, 2023, the Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers penned a 6000-word essay in The Monthly entitled ‘Capitalism after the Crises’. Chalmers’ linking of ‘crisis’ to capitalism is by no means accidental.

In this talk, I reveal the intrinsic but often non-apparent link between ‘crisis’ and ‘capitalism’, as well as the inner logic of Chalmers’ essay, through a detailed, corpus-assisted semantic analysis of the term ‘crisis’. In so doing, I also argue for the keyword status of ‘crisis’ in contemporary public discourse in the liberal Anglosphere and caution against the indiscriminate application of the ‘crisis lens’ to framing and making sense of situations and events in non-liberal societies.  

Speaker
Dr Zhengdao Ye
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Translation, ANU School of Literature, Language & Linguistics