果冻传媒

Organising in Extreme Contexts Seminar series (online)

The Organizing in Extreme Contexts Seminar Series is an online, international, and interdisciplinary series of talks and workshops bringing together the community of scholars researching extreme contexts. It has been held since 2020 and is hosted by ECU Co-Director Derin Kent and ECU Scientific advisor Markus H盲llgren.

For upcoming seminars, please check back here, the LinkedIn page of the ECU, or Extreme Contexts Community. To get on the mailing list, please email derin.kent@wbs.ac.uk or markus.hallgren@umu.se

Some previous episodes of the series are available to watch on YouTube (external link):

Advanced Ethnographic Methods in Organisation and Management Research (果冻传媒 Business School)

The Advanced Ethnographic Methods in Organisation & Management Research course is held annually at 果冻传媒 Business School. This course is designed for Doctoral students and students on Master鈥檚-level pathways into Doctoral study who have (or will have) an active ethnographic research project.

The course provides structured methodological support across core and advanced aspects of ethnographic research, including field planning, reflexivity and positionality, fieldnote practices, early-stage analysis, memo writing, visual representations like diagrams and table creation, and feedback on emerging projects.

The module is led by ECU Co-Director Adrian Marrison and facilitated by an outstanding group of ethnographic scholars, and in previous years has included ECU Steering committee member Davide Nicolini (WBS), ECU scientific advisor Mark de Rond (Cambridge), Karin Ali (果冻传媒 Medical School), and Marjolaine Rostain (WBS). Students will engage closely with facilitators and classic and contemporary ethnographic scholarship, while working directly on their own projects. The emphasis is on building methodological confidence, analytic judgement, and ethnographic craft in ways that directly inform their ongoing research and eventual journal submission.

If you or a student you supervise are seeking advanced methodological training in ethnography to support an active or emerging research project, please email to get in touch to discuss suitability.

Addressing Dualities of Resilience and Vulnerability in Extreme Contexts (EGOS Sub-Theme)

The 2027 EGOS hosted held at University of Liverpool will feature the sub-theme "Addressing Dualities of Resilience and Vulnerability in Extreme Contexts" convened by ECU Co-Director Derin Kent, Gloria Kutscher (University of Southampton), and Anna Danner-Schr枚der (RPTU Kaiserslautern).

The programme can be found here (external link):

Summary: Attention to extreme contexts research has been growing rapidly in recent years, seen in reviews (H盲llgren et al., 2018), special issues (H盲llgren et al., 2025), methodological pieces (Wright et al., 2023), and the EGOS standing working group (2020鈥�2025). Scholars have turned to extreme contexts鈥攕ettings marked by risks, emergencies, and disruptions鈥攖o learn about a variety of organizational phenomena. What is striking about the growing literature is the duality of human and organizational experience represented in it. Studies of extreme contexts show that the darkest moments of organizational life can bring out people鈥檚 best. Hence, in extreme contexts we find individual and organizational resilience (Caza et al., 2020), organizational learning leading to new capabilities (Christianson et al., 2009), improvisation under uncertainty (Geiger et al., 2021), social bonding (O鈥橬eill & Rothbard, 2017), personal and professional growth (Kent & Dacin, 2025), and profoundly meaningful work (Kent, 2019)鈥攑rocesses which appear to be enabled or encouraged by the extremeness of the situation itself. But good exists alongside the bad. Extreme contexts are also where scholars look when they want to learn about vulnerability (Weick, 1990), impaired decision-making (Cornelissen et al., 2014), trauma (Stackhouse, 2025), loss of meaning (de Rond & Lok, 2016), and helplessness (Rauch & Ansari, 2025). These dualities mirror findings in other fields that associate growth with (some) adversity: consider ecosystems becoming more resilient after mild disturbances (intermediate disturbance hypothesis), damaged tissue growing back stronger after exercise (hypertrophy), the concept of antifragility, and immune systems learning from childhood exposure to microorganisms (hygiene hypothesis). Therefore, we believe it is time to gain a broader perspective of how 鈥済ood鈥� and 鈥渂ad鈥� both arise in and from extreme contexts. In this subtheme, we wish to direct attention to two areas that can inform theorizing about the duality of the extreme.

Extreme Contexts Community on LinkedIn

The Extreme Contexts Community is a place to find and post information of interest to the extreme contexts community, including upcoming events and initiatives, journal publications, special issues, and more. Join at (external link):

News can also be emailed to info@organizingextremecontexts.org

Mentoring Programme

The mentoring programme is designed to provide guidance and support to postdocs and junior faculty (nontenured) as they navigate their academic and professional journeys. The mentoring programme is built on the idea to foster a culture of community among extreme contexts enthusiasts, and to create friendly exchanges among like-minded scholars.

For more information on how to get involved in the next batch of mentors and mentees, please contact Madeleine Rauch at m.rauch@jbs.cam.ac.uk

The aim of the RnR Club is to develop the community and to help scholars publish extreme context research in high quality Management and Organization Studies journals. For more information, contact Robin Burrrow at robin.burrow@york.ac.uk