Review of James Cairns’ In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025)
Tell me, who would you want by your side at a time of crisis, personal or other?
I imagine it might be someone to help navigate us through this haze of unpredictable futures and tempestuous presents with collective wisdom culled from an informative range of sources: political, historical, philosophical, economic, sociological, classical, contemporary, local, global. Someone perspicacious enough to ably distil this gathered knowledge but introspective enough not to look for easy answers, pat solutions. Someone who can anticipate your various and sundry interrogations and objections—all those what ifs, why-nots and buts—with openness and latitude. Someone who has looked into the eye of a personal tornado and lived to tell the tale. Someone who knows, with the clarity of hindsight and foresight, that surviving the next set of crises calls for that rarefied balance of self-compassion and gratitude to those communities—familial, social, spiritual—that provide us shelter in a storm.
If a book can be the companion one wants by one’s side at a time of crisis, personal or other, then let that book be James Cairns’ In Crisis, on Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (Wolsak & Wynn, 2025). In this at once prescient and self-reflective collection of essays, Cairns thoughtfully examines various types of crises: the crisis of democracy, the crisis of truth in a “post-truth” world, and the environmental crisis. He also considers “crisis,” more broadly, as abstractions or chimeras demanding equal parts critical attention and equal parts personal scrutiny; and he considers crisis as sociopolitical reality tugging at the fabric of our shared humanity at a time when there is nothing hyperbolic about a father fearing a flash flood might swallow his children playing by a riverside, or when national myths of unity and liberal humanism continue to hide the truths of “Indigenous dispossession, the truth of economic equality, the truth of corporate pillaging . . . of violence against marginalized peoples.”
At the centre of these at once intellectually far-ranging and deeply personal ruminations, Cairns approaches the so-called age of “permacrisis” as a father, as a university professor and social justice activist, and by way of his own struggle with addiction, deftly walking us through what is a carefully researched collection in a way that never seems heavy-handed or overwhelming. And we, the reader, are invited to walk alongside him, as we ponder the nature of crisis, itself, and what it calls upon us to remember, acknowledge, respond to and, perhaps, imagine anew.
More about In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times :
Drawing on social research, pop culture and literature, as well as on his experience as an activist, father and teacher, James Cairns explores the ecological crisis, Trump's return to power amid the so-called crisis of democracy, his own struggle with addiction and other moments of truth facing us today. In a series of insightful essays that move deftly between personal, theoretical and historical approaches he considers not only what makes something a crisis, but also how to navigate the effect of these destabilizing times on ourselves, on our families and on the world.
About James Cairns:
James Cairns lives with his family in Paris, Ontario, on territory that the Haldimand Treaty of 1784 recognizes as belonging to the Six Nations of the Grand River in perpetuity. He is a professor in the Department of Indigenous Studies, Law and Social Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, where his courses and research focus on political theory and social movements. James is a staff writer at the Hamilton Review of Books, and the community relations director for the Paris-based Riverside Reading Series. James has published three books with the University of Toronto Press, most recently, The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (2017), as well as numerous essays in periodicals such as Canadian Notes & Queries, the Montreal Review of Books, Briarpatch, TOPIA, Rethinking Marxism and the Journal of Canadian Studies. James’ essay “My Struggle and My Struggle,” originally published in CNQ, appeared in Biblioasis’s Best Canadian Essays, 2025 anthology.
Mariam Pirbhai is a creative writer and academic. She is the award-winning author of a short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories, a novel titled Isolated Incident, and a book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging. She has also authored several academic works on diasporic, postcolonial and world literature, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific. Mariam was born in Pakistan and lived in England, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines before her family immigrated to Canada in the late 1980s. She completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of Montreal, for which she received the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Mariam lives and works in Waterloo, where she enjoys photographing and painting the natural landscapes of southwestern Ontario.