This lab undertakes an investigation of how crises manifest materially in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, focusing on what constitutes a crisis—its tangible or conceptual stuff. Through an ethnographic approach to material politics, we aim to develop insights about how crises take shape materially—through bodies, spaces, technologies, and infrastructures. We combine a focus on geopolitical infrastructures (such as electrical grids, submarine cables, a transnational railway, bunkers, and a super-battery factory); with attention to ordinary material practices in uncertain situations (such as those of refugees and precarious people). The research elucidates how disruptions, sabotages, decay, floods and blackouts are prevented, answered, resisted, and remembered through different material engagements, thus challenging the perception of crises as discrete, isolated events. Everyday reports of crises proliferate across different regions today; news about the climate crisis, financial crisis, industrial crisis and cyberattacks have become ordinary, pointing at an increase in vulnerabilities across a range of issues.

Contemporary crises, however, entail a urgent yet continuous negotiation with unstable systems to cope with a multiplicity of uncertainties and disruptions. Drawing on this, we study: a) How crises are being managed through a series of critical infrastructures and material practices in the margins of Europe; b) How crises are historically inscribed and sedimented in things; c) The comparative angles between the Baltic region and Spain, particularly in terms of infrastructure, crisis management, and materiality. As NATO’s eastern flank and frontline of the EU, the Baltic states are key sites for understanding how crises are no longer confined to single events, but instead embedded in data wires, fences, grids, gas pipelines, gauges, the domestic ecology of things, and hybrid borders. Thus, this high- impact project seeks not only to enrich academic knowledge but also to inform future policies aimed at enhancing resilience and social cohesion in the face of uncertainty.