At the Crossroads of Crisis and Opportunity: Interdisciplinary Conversations

Abstract

Can crises and opportunities truly go hand in hand? The twelve chapters in this interdisciplinary collection provide a number of telling perspectives and conversational approaches that reflect upon the serious implications of this important question. They overwhelmingly agree that difficult crises events inevitably force individuals and societies to crossroads in their lives where they must make challenging personal and collective choices. Nonetheless, they also confirm that even faced with apparently new terrain and the confusing cartography of discomforting change there are unique and opportune pathways of response that can lead to positive developmental destinations. Attending to this question from the personal, communal, and international perspectives, in dialogue, academics and practitioners from around the globe interrogate this possibility linking the threads between the processes and conditions in which opportunities borne of crises might flounder or be assisted to flourish.