[PeDAGoG] Utopian Studies Society Conference 2022: Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies

[Davis, Laurence]

Dear all,

The following call for papers may be of interest:

http://utopian-studies-europe.org/conference/


Utopian Studies Society Conference 2022 - Call for Papers
July 13th – 15th, the University of Brighton, England.

Conference Title: Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies
            Keynote Speakers to include Professor Jack Halberstam on Queering Utopia


The 2022 Utopian Studies Society (USS) Conference is dedicated to an exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary praxis. It will create a space where we can explore the role of utopian thinking and practice in addressing some of the fundamental challenges of our times. As part of this exploration, we wish to engage those who use utopian thinking and practices to understand our present moment, its patterns of continuity and discontinuity with the times which generated it.

The organisers of the last year’s conference noted that our time ‘is a turning point for Utopian Studies.’ In agreement, the organisers of this year’s conference wish to explore what our time is made of: our aim is to turn the concept of utopia, its long history and the contestations which make that history, to the present. To help thematise this, the conference organisers have focused on ‘hope’ as a key contested concept, one which can act as a focaliser for the conference’s exploration of the situation of utopia in the twenty-first century.

It is our premise that there needs to be something fierce in any attachment to utopian thinking in these times. The world of the twenty-first century seems to be one committed not merely to the cancellation of hope but to the drowning of it in an excess of cruelty. That fierceness cannot be forged out of commitment alone, however: it requires a depth of understanding both of itself and of what it throws itself against. Do we yet have that depth understanding of utopian hope in what are arguably anti-utopian times?

Utopian thinking – and the scholarship engaging with it – has always had an antagonistic edge: a sharp and unyielding critical relationship to the way things are in favour of how they might be. This presence of a critical relationship to the present is differentiated from the politics embedded in other models of thought by the future-focus of utopianism, the founding and sublation of critique by hope. Is this a model of thinking or even an ideal of thinking sufficient to our own moment, however?

Hope – Utopian and Otherwise

The 2022 USS Conference is dedicated to exploring the situation of utopia and of utopian thinking in the current conjuncture. It is specifically meant to focus on how ‘hope’ is active in the present, the forms it takes in politics, culture and philosophy. Not all forms of hope are utopian however: we anticipate the conference engaging with the mobilisation of hope in discourses which are explicitly or implicitly anti-utopian - whether at work in the fields of politics and culture or in the practices of everyday life.

USS and Utopia beyond the University
As part of the turn to the present of this USS Conference, we aim to design a programme which centres work designed to blur or break the well-policed and expensive borders between the university and the communities within which universities sit. To this end, we are proposing working with local activists in Brighton to establish some in-person and remote-access events which will highlight and explore hope as it is present in the politics of migrant-solidarity, anarchist and queer groups and spaces. We wish to open this thread of the conference to the work of others outside the formal limits of academia or who are inside an academic space pushing out. If you are involved with some work in your community (we understand communities as being social rather than sheerly geographical spaces, made by relationships and practices rather than maps), please consider how you could be involved and get in touch.

The Organising Committee encourages individuals and research groups to curate their own panel proposals as a way of giving topics, problems and questions the significant scope they deserve. We also welcome individual abstracts which we hope to build into a number of thematic panels to facilitate delegates’ navigation of the conference. Potential topics for either panels or individuals include (but are not limited to):

Hope in or as solidarity work
Neoliberal forms of hope
Does hope need to be decolonised?
Indigenous hope
Queer forms of hope
Global ecocide and catastrophic hope
Hope, post-individualism, and communism
Culture is not Enough: hope in dystopian and post-apocalyptic fictions
Methodological questions and hope, or the affordances and limits of hope as a concept
The politics of hope?
Utopian hope versus privatised hope
What happens to hope in dystopia?
Critical hope
Pessimistic hope
Radical and revolutionary hope
Hope and the university

Please send your abstract or other proposal to utopianstudiesconf at brighton.ac.uk<mailto:utopianstudiesconf at brighton.ac.uk> and indicate if you would like to engage remotely or in-person. The deadline for receipt of abstracts and proposals is April 4th, 2022

Proposals for presenting high-quality research and practice are welcome in one of the following formats:


  *   20-minute paper / please submit a 250-word abstract
  *   Panel of multiple presentations (3 x 20-minute presentations for example or 5-7 x  flash papers) by named contributors and chair / please submit a proposal with 1) the outline of the panel theme; 2) the presenters, their format and notes on their papers; 3) the name of the chair.
  *   Roundtable of multiple speakers on a theme with a named chair to fit into a 90-minute slot.
  *   Workshops on topics related to the conference theme or utopian studies more broadly, including pedagogy and career development.
  *   We also welcome non-traditional formats for presenting work  -  duologues, performances, musical presentations, film screenings, debates and manifesto presentations, for example.

The conference fee for in-person participation will be 120 GBP (full fee for 3 days). This in-person conference fee will be either refunded or not levied if covid infection rates make personal attendance impossible.

The conference fee for online participation will be 20 GBP (3 days full fee)

About 20 waivers of the online conference fee will be available. To apply for a fee-waiver, please contact the USS/E Secretary at justynagalantusse at utopos.net<mailto:justynagalantusse at utopos.net> for an application form.

Best wishes,

Laurence


Dr. Laurence Davis

Director of the BSc Government and Political Science

Department of Government and Politics

University College Cork, Ireland

http://publish.ucc.ie/profiles/B007/ldavis



UCC is proud to hold an Athena SWAN Bronze Award.
Advancing gender equality: representation, progression and success for all.


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