Today, we find ourselves in a historical formation in which political, economic, and cultural disruptions increasingly appear not as anomalies but as structuring principles of everyday life. What once appeared as singular breaks, have since settled into an ordinary rhythm of socio-political existence. Like Yerbolat Tolepbay’s human figure in the art piece headlining this issue of On_Culture, [1] we find ourselves gazing at the colorful splinters of normalcy promising bright futures, but with sharp edges and portending constant insecurity. Disruption, from the Latin disrumpere meaning “to burst apart,” implies a violent dissolution of continuity, a forcible severance that destabilizes reality. [2] However, in the present, it can feel like disruption, rather than designating extraordinary events, has become integral to the texture of the everyday. And though disruption itself is hardly novel—history has always proceeded unevenly, punctuated by convulsions, uprisings and wars, epidemics and revolutions, collapses and resurgences—our epoch appears distinguished from previous ones not merely by the frequency of disruptions but by their pervasive simultaneity and scope.

This experience of living in an age of disruption has two facets. On the one hand, a number of events have indeed destabilized a sense of normalcy. The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center exposed the supposed ‘End of History’ as the myth it had always been. The 2009 financial crisis destabilized trust in markets and capitalism, and the ensuing euro area crisis in turn destabilized trust in the euro itself, the European Union, and European solidarity. Since then, the disruptions have seemingly only accelerated: the COVID-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to name but a few, have disrupted not only hopes of security and prosperity, liberty, and peace, but the daily lives of millions of people. The experience of disruption has also, on the other hand, been fueled by a cultural obsession with disruptions. Sociologist Ulrich Bröckling has diagnosed an “inflationary usage” of the term. [3] It can be found in the Silicon Valley tech industry that markets its products with the promise of disruption. [4] Similarly, many populists’ claim to power is that they alone would disrupt the status quo. This status quo is also threatened by environmentalists who seek to disrupt it in pursuit of sustainability. Disruption—as event and idea—is ubiquitous.

This is not least due to disruptions being, as Marcus Vollmer argues, a complex phenomenon comprising a multitude of interrelated events that challenge established orders, prompting significant shifts in social structures and collective behavior. [5] These disruptions manifest across multiple domains. While “some disruptions are naturally occurring,” [6] for example earthquakes, their consequences are always mediated through social and cultural contexts. Thus, they also impact individual lives. An economic crisis, for instance, does not remain at the level of financial markets but materializes as job loss, insecurity, or forced migration; political upheaval unsettles not only states and institutions but also families and intimate relationships; ecological collapse appears as a public health issue, population displacement, increased health risk in everyday life. What begins as systemic rupture thus cascades into the sphere of lived experience, in(tro)ducing profound changes into individual subjectivities, routines, and futures. [7]

Examining four explicitly different examples can shed light on the multiplicity of disruptions. The first is the Arab Spring, where protestors once deemed dissidents briefly occupied the terrain of sovereign decision-making, only for these ruptures to be folded back into authoritarian restoration or global security discourse. Hence, the Arab Spring did not merely affect political structures within Tunisia, Egypt, or Syria, among other Arab countries, but resonated across geopolitical configurations, its ripples refracted and amplified through digital media, reshaping narratives of democracy and authority. [8] Brexit, our second example, marked a conceptual disruption, unsettling assumptions about sovereignty, identity, and collective belonging, reverberating throughout Europe and beyond. While Brexit was indeed animated by a desire to reclaim and reassert a coherent British national identity—an attempt to ‘settle’ what many perceived as the disorder of globalization and Britain’s entanglement with the EU—this very act produced a profound conceptual and political disruption. The fantasy of restoration collided with the complexities of interdependence, revealing how attempts to resolve national identity through rupture can generate even deeper epistemic and institutional instability. Thus, Brexit becomes both an effort to un-disrupt perceived loss and the site where foundational concepts of statehood, citizenship, and belonging were rendered radically uncertain.

Similarly, our third example, the COVID-19 pandemic, vividly revealed and intensified these disruptions, serving not only as a biological crisis, but as an epistemological and ontological upheaval. Overnight, familiar patterns of movement, relation, and governance dissolved into uncertainty, blurring distinctions between public and private, health and illness, life and death. Finally, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following the killing of George Floyd was another profound disruption, [9] catalyzing global reckonings with structural racism, colonial legacies, and the enduring violence embedded in liberal democratic states. [10] These different formations, a number of networked uprisings, procedural sovereignty via referendum, a problem of biosecurity, and protests for racial justice as counter-disruption precisely show that disruption is not a single kind of event but a cross-scalar logic that travels between street, state, platform, and body.

This special issue came into being through a sustained process of reckoning with the ubiquity of disruptions. In our conversations, we, as guest editors, found ourselves repeatedly returning to the intuition that disruption had become, as mentioned above, ordinary, woven into the fabric of political instability, economic volatility, cultural contestation, and social fragmentation. The intensification brought about by the information society and the proliferation of social media only made this more palpable: disruption circulating as spectacle, as affect, as meme [11] and scandal, as a continuous demand on attention and imagination. As guest editors, we came together from different disciplinary trajectories to interrogate this casualness, this normalization of rupture, and it was through these sustained exchanges that the idea for the issue crystallized. Our editorial process was itself shaped by the condition we sought to analyze; marked by interruptions, shifting schedules, and the pressures of multiple crises unfolding around us. This experience reinforced our conviction that disruption is not simply an object of study but a force structuring the very conditions of research, collaboration, and critique. What does it mean, then, to think of disruption not as anomaly but as atmosphere, as temporality, as the operative mode of governance and mediation in late liberal societies? The _Articles, _Essays, and _Perspectives collected here are the outcome of this shared reflection. They do not merely catalog disparate instances of disruption but attempt to think with and through disruption’s ubiquity, asking how it reshapes practices of knowledge, reconfigures cultural imaginaries, and unsettles the very grounds on which critique itself must stand.

The contributions to this issue of On_Culture thus share an interest in the disruption of prevailing narratives. At the same time, disruption can also be a technology of governance to uphold normalcy. Drawing on Elizabeth Povinelli’s incisive analysis of late liberalism’s exhaustion, [12] we want to argue that disruption has become a mode through which liberal democratic states manage their own contradictions while maintaining the fiction of democratic inclusion. In this context, disruption functions not merely as an external force acting upon stable liberal subjects, [13] but the liberal system itself forces subjection to disruptions. In an effort to accommodate these changes, the subject of late modernity is relentlessly interpellated by the imperative to adapt, to remain fluid and flexible, constantly prepared for unforeseen upheavals. Thus, disruption mandates flexibility, resilience, and self-governance, thereby reproducing liberal order through subject-formation. Attending to the liberal subject, thus, we show how disruption functions as a technology of governmentality: it remakes who we are so that the system can endure.

Such subject formation is not only motivated by the imperative to adapt, but also by hope for a better, freer life. Yet, this hope is perpetually thwarted. To consider this, we have to turn to the temporality of late liberalism, the temporality of ‘post-.’ The prefix ‘post-’ often denotes periods or conditions following disruptions, signalling new phases characterized by dynamics, norms, and realities distinct from preceding times. At the same time, however, the prefix links the new period or condition to the preceding one, defining it both with regards to the disruption as well as the disrupted. The prefix ‘post-’ thus resides in a continual interregnum, a state where, according to Antonio Gramsci, the old is dying, but the new are not yet born. [14] This is most obvious in the term “postmodernity:” despite its emphasis on moving beyond modernity, it cannot seem to be detached from the period it is meant to overcome. [15] Although not all disruptions lead to ‘post-’ concepts, the two are closely intertwined. As Ulrich Beck states, “[p]ast plus post—that is the basic recipe with which we confront a reality that is out of joint.” [16] Historian Herman Paul further notes that the use of ‘post-’ emerged prominently in the twentieth century, a time riddled with disruptions, marking a move beyond outdated understandings. [17] Gustavo Gutiérrez captures this sentiment by describing the twenty-first century as an era of “post-everything,” echoing Beck’s earlier assertion: “Everything is post.” [18] Thus, ‘post-’ concepts articulate new identity constructs after disruption has destabilized but not entirely removed previous forms.

But what happens when ‘post-’ becomes not a moment of overcoming but a perpetual condition of deferral? One might suggest that late liberalism operates precisely through this temporality of the ‘post-,’ always promising that we are moving beyond previous forms of domination while ensuring that such movement never actually arrives at anything new. Thus, late liberalism is grounded in a temporality that can be described as presentist in the sense of François Hartog, as a regime caught in “the treadmill of an unending now.” [19] The mushrooming of terms prefixed with ‘post-’—postcolonial, postmodern, posthuman, postpolitical, and their conceptual kin—reveals itself not as testimony of authentic metamorphosis of the human condition, but rather as manifestations of a fundamental epistemological crisis. These proliferating terminologies betray a profound disruption in our comprehension of being-as-such, suggesting that what we are witnessing is not the transcendence of historical categories but the fragmentation of our capacity to apprehend the essential structure of existence itself. The very multiplicity of these ‘post-’ formations points toward an underlying ontological uncertainty, wherein the stability of being-in-the-world has been called into question, leaving us suspended between discarded frameworks of understanding and the as-yet-unarticulated horizon of genuine philosophical renewal. Each ‘post-’ promises movement beyond existing contradictions while actually reinforcing them, creating a conceptual mode marked by a ‘not-quite-not-quite’ epistemology: a space where transformation is always imminent but never arrives—the interregnum.

While disruptions thus reproduce the liberal order internally, they are also key moments for debating belonging. Who at all gets the chance to count themselves among the liberal subjects striving for the promise of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? In this context, disruptions operate within a racialized technology of governance. Following Povinelli’s analysis in Geontologies, we understand disruption as producing what she calls “geontopower,” that is, a form of power that operates through the division between Life and Nonlife, between what counts as lively matter deserving of care and what is relegated to the realm of the inert. [20] In this framework, disruption becomes a mechanism for sorting populations into those whose lives matter, whose disruption is grievable, [21] whose suffering demands response, and those who exist in what Povinelli terms the Desert, that is spaces of abandonment where life persists but is not recognized as Life. [22]

This role of disruptions in racialized technologies of governance is observable in the differential treatment of displaced populations in recent years: Ukrainian refugees fleeing Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion were largely welcomed through accelerated asylum pathways, framed within a rhetoric of shared European identity and humanitarian urgency. Their displacement was rendered intelligible within the symbolic order of liberal democracy: recognized, grieved, and responded to. In contrast, the deaths of Syrian, Afghan, and sub-Saharan African migrants in the Mediterranean, or their prolonged containment in camps on the edges of Europe, are met with affective detachment and procedural indifference. [23] These lives are not merely ungrievable, they are rendered structurally abject and cast out from the field of political recognizability. [24] Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s conception of the term abject, [25] we might understand this not simply as exclusion but as a process of abjection, wherein certain populations are expelled to preserve the coherence of a normative political subject. Povinelli’s “Desert” is thus a space where life remains biologically present but is symbolically and politically unacknowledged. The asymmetry does not reflect policy alone, but a deeper semiotic economy: a regime of meaning-making in which only some disruptions are allowed to signify as loss, while others are rendered inassimilable, polluting, or disposable. This reveals how liberal orders maintain themselves not only through inclusion but through continuous production of abject, ungrievable life.

There are further connections between disruptions and marginalization—a theme that many contributions to this issue touch upon. Disruptions are never evenly distributed; marginalized communities disproportionately bear the brunt of technological, ecological, and political upheavals. Yet, these communities do not passively suffer disruption; they actively craft alternative epistemologies and vernacular strategies of endurance and resistance. Disruption thus becomes not merely a loss to be mourned but a condition to leverage as a site of resistance, reimagination, and transformation. As Koch and Nanz emphasize, disruptions have productive consequences that provoke critical reflections and new forms of cultural expression. [26] Although we must be careful not to romanticize resistance or to assume that all forms of endurance contain within them the seeds of liberation, we want to emphasize the potential of such creative disruptions—a potential also explored by many contributions to this issue.

In her _Article, Sandra Engels focuses on disruptions of heritage, namely the advancement of narratives divergent from the values and meanings usually and authoritatively attributed to a heritage item. She does so by examining the case study of St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt, Germany. As the site of the first German parliament, this rebuilt former church is seen as an important place in the history of German democracy within the authorized heritage discourse. This interpretation, however, has been criticised in recent years from quite different angles. On the one hand, the Decolonize Alliance criticises a blindness towards the link between German democratic and colonial histories within the heritage discourse on St. Paul’s Church. They seek to disrupt this discourse aiming at the recognition of marginalized voices. On the other hand, the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) seeks a disruption of the authorized heritage discourse to advance a simplified and glorified version of German national history. Instead of recognizing marginalized voices, they aim at the establishment of a positive national identity through propagating a glorious national history.

From heritage and German national history to disruptive radical feminism in Italy and the United States, Mehmet Dosemeci explores in his _Article how disruption shaped the formation of radical political subjectivities among Italian workerists (Operaismo) and radical feminists in Italy and the United States during the late 1960s and 1970s. Rather than seeking integration into dominant structures, both groups enacted a disavowal of their socially assigned roles, workers refusing the dignity of labor and women rejecting patriarchal gender roles, to constitute themselves as autonomous political subjects. Through factory occupations, organized absenteeism, and the invention of new workplace tactics, Italian workers challenged not only exploitation but the very category of ‘worker’ itself. Similarly, radical feminists withdrew from the male-dominated New Left to develop women-only groups, consciousness-raising practices, and separatist politics that refused both liberal equality and patriarchal history. The article highlights how these disruptive practices did not aim for representation or reform but for self-valorization and new forms of life, language, and sociality.

Cristina Moreno-Almeida’s _Essay examines the cyclical narratives that surround digital disruption, awakening, and historical revival in the postdigital era. Taking inspiration from Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep, the essay critiques techno-optimistic framings that equate digital infrastructure with progress and liberation, particularly through the example of the Arab Spring. By tracing how digital technologies were initially celebrated as tools of emancipation and later became mechanisms of surveillance, disillusionment, and reactionary mobilization, she interrogates the ideological stakes embedded in digital affordances. Drawing on the metaphor of biphasic sleep to conceptualize cyclical temporality, the article explores how postdigital culture nurtures a revisionist relationship to history, especially via alt-right mythologies that romanticize a medieval past. Through this lens, digital disruptions become less about democratic awakening and more about reasserting patriarchal and authoritarian structures, often masked as cultural revival. The essay critiques the appropriation of medieval iconography and rhetoric by far-right actors who exploit digital infrastructures for exclusionary identity politics. Furthermore, it demonstrates that digital platforms are not neutral vessels, but political terrains where narratives of freedom and awakening are constantly contested, and often co-opted to serve reactionary ends. Against the myth of progress, Moreno-Almeida calls for a critical reappraisal of digital temporality and its entanglement with authoritarian nostalgia, cultural memory, and cycles of forgetting.

In her _Perspective, Rachelle Sabourin explores the affective and political dimensions of mourning through a collaborative stickering project launched in the wake of her close friend Justin’s passing. Drawing from queer theory, visual culture studies, and grief scholarship, Sabourin conceptualizes the project as a form of ‘grief time’; a non-linear, affectively charged temporality that resists normative narratives of healing and closure. The act of distributing and pasting Justin’s graffiti tag across cities in North America and Europe becomes a shared ritual of remembrance that reconfigures space, visibility, and collective memory. Sabourin situates this art practice within the aesthetics and ethics of witnessing, arguing that the stickers function both as autobiographical residue and communal totem, challenging the subcultural boundaries of graffiti and the spatial expectations of public mourning. The project’s resonance lies not only in its symbolic reanimation of Justin’s presence, but also in its transgressive mode of grieving that defies privatized, linear models of loss. As such, Sabourin invites us to consider how art practices rooted in love and loss can exceed their autobiographical origins to forge intimate yet unruly networks of remembrance.

Danielle Drozdzewski’s _Essay traces the entangled nature of multiple ‘posts’—postwar, postsocialist, postcolonial—across different geographic contexts. Drawing on examples from Germany, Poland, and Australia, she illustrates how commemorative practices and memorial landscapes can both reinforce and disrupt everyday life. Through the concept of “cruel optimism,” [27] she interrogates our attachments to the ‘post’ as a hopeful but often constraining frame. As a geographer, she “thinks-with” [28] place and memory, offering a deeply embodied perspective shaped by her own transnational positionality. Her reflections challenge us to critically examine the disruptions and silences embedded in national narratives and to consider how marginalized groups are rendered absent or even disruptive within them. In doing so, the essay opens up an urgent question: what does the ‘post’ actually allow us to imagine?

In her _Article, Carissa Ma offers a powerful dual intervention. Firstly, she provides a critique of Hong Kong’s post-2020 developmentalist discourse from a disabled perspective, revealing how state narratives of ‘restoration’ and ‘rehabilitation’ rely on ableist metaphors that equate dissent with illness and normalize coercive conformity. Secondly, she offers a fresh interpretation of Hon Lai-chu’s surrealist short stories, demonstrating how they challenge these normative discourses by presenting speculative, disability-centred narratives. The article shows how Hon’s fiction suggests alternative futures that resist the ideologies of cure, productivity, and cheerful optimism. By intertwining political analysis and literary interpretation, Ma highlights the disorienting and disruptive potential of disabled perspectives. In doing so, she reclaims disruption not as chaos to be overcome, but as a critical force that challenges dominant narratives of development. In a context where marginalized bodies are considered disposable, the essay’s focus on disobedient bodies and crip horizons feels urgent and inspiring.

Turning to the Kazakhstan pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Nikolay Smirnov explores in his _Perspective how the mythical land of Jerūiyq, from ancient Kazakh legends, presents decolonial futurism as a form of creative disruption. Engaging with the mythical land of Jerūiyq as both a symbol and a spatial strategy, Smirnov’s contribution highlights how artistic practices blend speculative fiction with indigenous cosmologies to create new geographical spaces. Smirnov illustrates how installations by artists from various generations—ranging from yurt-rockets to AI-transformed throat singing—collapse binaries such as tradition/technology, and utopia/dystopia. Through this, the exhibition positions disruption not merely as destruction, but as imaginative reworlding. However, Smirnov also critically examines the paradoxes of staging such disruption within global art institutions like the Biennale, where decolonial indigeneity is at risk of being appropriated by hegemonic, exclusive multiculturalism. This dual process of disrupting and reinforcing global structures highlights the productive tension at the heart of decolonial futurism. The journey ‘beyond the horizon’ remains an artistic vision and a critical provocation.

Finally, Jennifer Konrad’s _Article offers a compelling exploration of the intersection between architectural theory and the logic of disruption. By tracing the intellectual lineage of deconstructivist architecture back to Derrida’s philosophy, Konrad reveals how architectural form can operate as both critique and intervention. Disruptions, understood here not as mere malfunctions, but as productive departures from the norm, become central tools in exposing the contingency of architectural meaning, order, and function. Through a detailed analysis of Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, the _Article demonstrates how multiple, overlapping systems can destabilize inherited aesthetic and political hierarchies. In doing so, Konrad highlights the reflexive and political potential of space and reads deconstructivist architecture as a disruptive practice that resists metaphysical closure. She invites the reader to view built environments as dynamic arenas where meaning is contested and reorganized, rather than static structures.

The contributions to the issue demonstrate how disruption has the capacity to reveal what has been silenced, challenge the prevailing narrative and open up spaces, in which marginalized groups are able to articulate their identities. They thus demonstrate that disruption should not be approached as a single event. Instead, what is required is engagement with the ways in which disruption shapes subjectivities and generates forms of survival. As the contributions to the issue demonstrate, disruption has the capacity to unsettle hegemonic narratives and reveal marginalized strategies and reimaginations. Thus, disruption can be creative: it can create more inclusive communities, more just societies and better futures. Nevertheless, it should be noted that disruption can function as a technique of normalisation. The challenge for future research is to integrate these ambivalences: to inquire not only how disruption destabilizes, but also how it governs; not only how it opens alternative possibilities but also how it forecloses them. By emphasising the dual aspects of disruption, the reader is encouraged to critically examine their own position within these processes. Disruption is not a self-contained phenomenon; rather, it is a condition that organizes lives, relationships, and knowledge production.

_How to Cite

Farouk El Maarouf, Justus Grebe, and Anastasiia Marsheva. “Disruption,” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture 19 (2025). <https://doi.org/10.22029/oc.2025.1533>.