Disrupted spaces: The impact of economic crisis on everyday life

Abstract

Regional development research has long been shaped by a “male gaze” that privileges economic production, innovation, and growth—while sidelining the forms of care, emotions, maintenance, and everyday labour that supports life in regions (Ormerod, 2023). In this paper, I study how economic crises are lived and felt at the level of everyday life, drawing on the experiences of Danish mink farmers who were forced to cull their animals and shut down their farms during the COVID-19 pandemic. While regional studies typically assess the impacts of economic crisis through macroeconomic indicators and performance metrics, this approach often obscures the emotional, relational, and embodied dimensions of disruption. Building on feminist geographic scholarship and Felski's (2000) theorization of the everyday, I show how crisis unsettles the temporal and spatial rhythms and habits that structure daily life, social roles, and intergenerational ties. The study foregrounds how livelihoods are sustained not only through production, but through informal labor, care work, and embodied knowledge passed down across generations. These everyday practices form subtle infrastructures of resilience—deeply rooted in place, yet vulnerable to state interventions and external shocks. The case of mink farming reveals how crisis reshapes not only what people do, but how they inhabit time, space, and community. By attending to these lived experiences, I offer an understanding of economic crisis—one that centers the silent, often invisible forms of labor and loss that accompany economic transformation.