This is a Call for Papers for a workshop I am co-organizing in Edinburgh in May 2024, together with Professor Davina Cooper (KCL) and Dr Ruth Houghton (Newcastle). The workshop will be part of a larger AHRC Networking Grant on utopia and failure, starting in late 2023.
The AHRC announcement is here:
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FX009122%2F1#/tabOverview
With the available funding, we want to convene three in-person workshops, one in Edinburgh (May 2024), one in Newcastle (September 2024) and one in London (November 2024). The first of these events will revolve around the idea that utopias can offer shelter from wider societal failures. Our second workshop will explore the many ways in which utopias incorporate failures creatively into their set-ups. Our final event will try to draw prior themes together and consider future plans and publications.
Below is some basic information on the Edinburgh event. The longer project description, covering all three workshops, can be found here:
Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia
In this workshop we seek to explore, positively and critically, the take-up and potential of utopian experiments to counter wider societal failings and experiences of failure. Our discussion will address how utopian fiction, design initiatives, community spaces, and the mobilisation of utopian desires and hopes, across different temporalities, get created and inhabited in response to wider oppressive social practices, including the competitive practices of mainstream societies, with their success/failure dyads. Utopia can seem to counter failure in several distinct ways. One turn to utopia is as shelter, escape, and comfort from the failings and failures that wider societies produce. Another takes up utopia within mainstream life as a radical ambition and ethos, rejecting notions of withdrawal and boundedness that escaping to utopia sometimes suggests. A third approach rejects the divisions between these two moves and foregrounds, instead, their interconnections.By exploring these and other relationships between failure and utopia, where utopia is framed as an antidote to failure, the workshop will explore several questions. These include: How do utopian projects respond to experiences of failure outside or beyond utopia? What counter-practices and ethoi do utopias offer (for instance, the emphasis on collaboration and cooperation rather than competition)? Can utopias’ alternatives be imagined and enacted in ways that undo wider cultures of failure? What can storytelling, both historical and contemporary, tell us about the desire to escape from social and interpersonal failure? These and related questions will guide the discussion during our first event.
Format
The workshop will take place in May 2024 over one and a half days at the University of Edinburgh. Presenters will be asked to share a paper of around 6,000 to 8,000 words with all the participants, at least two weeks ahead of the event. The workshop will include a roundtable to introduce the network’s objectives, presentations (and discussions) of papers, breakout sessions to examine whether utopias can offer escape and shelter from a society that produces individual and collective failure, and a final session drawing shared themes together and previewing the following two workshops.
Submission
If you would like to give a paper at our first event, please include an abstract on the application form (maximum 500 words):
https://forms.office.com/e/pY8Fg20E5L
The deadline for applications is September 5, 2023.
Mathias Thaler 