Compensatory Cultures: post-2008 Climate Mechanisms for Crisis Times
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2020 Number 99
Compensatory Cultures: post-2008 Climate Mechanisms for Crisis Times
Ella Harris pages -
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:99.04.2019
Abstract
This paper charts emerging scholarship on what I conceptualise as ‘compensatory cultures’; cultures that are, in essence, compensatory responses to crisis, but are presented and received as desirable, even preferable ways of organising life. Since the 2008 crash, precarity has become a new normal and a dominant structure-of-feeling in the global north. I argue that compensatory cultures alleviate precarity’s affective impacts, enabling ‘business as usual’, yet do so in ways that perpetuate that precarity and the conditions that reproduce it. I survey literature on compensatory urbanisms, compensatory labour and compensatory consumption; demonstrating the compensatory as a pervasive mechanism operating across various cultural settings in the post-recession, austerity context. The work explored reveals compensatory cultures as central in remaking places, structuring social relations and producing meaning in crisis times.
To cite this article
Ella Harris (2020) Compensatory Cultures: post-2008 Climate Mechanisms for Crisis Times, New Formations, 2020(99), -. https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:99.04.2019