This course explores how collective crises are experienced and represented. We will focus specifically on the use of creative practices to analyze, address, and mitigate such upheavals. Our inquiry will explore historical and contemporary health crises, environmental disasters, and national conflicts. We will study the antecedents of these events, read and listen to first person testimonies and reportage, and explore how people frame and respond to unsettling and often catastrophic conditions. Crises are not confined to their most dramatic events. Indeed, the scars they leave may linger for generations. As we shift focus from distant crises to those that touch us directly, we will consider how we practice our roles as witnesses, scholars, artists, and participants. The vocabulary and conceptual tools for our inquiry includes work by historians and theorists concerned with collective trauma, moral injury, and collective recovery.