Qi, Xiaoying. 2025. “Reconceptualizing Crisis: An Empirically Based Investigation.” Sociological Inquiry. First online. https://doi.org/10.1111/soin.70016

Abstract: Crisis is predominantly characterized in terms of its detrimental consequences. Drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews in Melbourne and Taipei, the article provides a critical and distinctive understanding of crisis. Crisis is conceptualized here as a disruptive prefiguring of new possibilities, both agentic and structural. In crisis, a situation of adversity is combined with a positive prospect of possibility previously unnoticed or unavailable that is exposed or generated by the disruption. Against the traditional or established tendency to define crisis as a moment or a turning point, the article argues that crisis is best understood as an unfolding dynamic process of change or courses of generative development. In explicating crisis, a counter-transformation approach is developed. Drawing on empirical data, the article expands the sociological understanding of crisis.

Xiaoying Qi, Australian Catholic University 
Associate Professor Xiaoying Qi was awarded a PhD from the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Her thesis won the Jean Martin Award of the Australian Sociological Association, given biennially to ‘the best PhD thesis in social science disciplines from an Australian tertiary institution’. Her most recent book, Entrepreneurs in Contemporary China: Wealth, Connections, and Crisis, is published by Cambridge University Press. A previous book, Remaking Families in Contemporary China(Oxford University Press, 2021), won the Stephen Crook Memorial Prize of the Australian Sociological Association. An earlier book, Globalized Knowledge Flows and Chinese Social Theory (London & New York: Routledge, 2014), was awarded The Raewyn Connell Prize Special Commendation of The Australian Sociological Association. Qi has published articles in leading international journals, including American Journal of Cultural Sociology, British Journal of Sociology, Current Sociology, International Sociology, Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review, and Sociology. Research innovation is evidenced in Qi’s introduction of analytical concepts in sociology, including ‘intellectual entrepreneurs’, ‘paradoxical integration’, and ‘veiled patriarchy’. Qi has extensive teaching experience and received the National Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning.