Crisis has now become a "timely" research topic. Yet most of the scholarship on crisis thus far has had political motivations. This book is concerned with how theorists within the humanities and social sciences have used the idea of crisis. As I will demonstrate, much of the ambiguity and rhetorical force of the concept, in its popular use in politics and public life, is also present in its academic theorizations. This chapter introduces the approach taken throughout of book, which involves treating crisis as a "conceptual paradigm". Through this approach, we can illuminate how crisis operates as a mode of thinking, rather than attempting to find an answer for what crises are.