Fall Series 2021

Climate Utopias for the Anthropocene: Politics, technoscience, and the imaginary work of green societal transitions

The concept of Utopia continues to change throughout time. In its original sense it referred to a good and/or non-existent place (eu/outopos) and involves thinking, dreaming and imagining new worlds. As Anna Bugasjkahas put it: 

“Utopianism is the expression of hope and optimism as to the future of the world, and allows to speculate and to “dream up” better communities, providing new points of view on the given reality, which stimulate action to change and improvement” (2021).

Different and better worlds (indeed also dystopian ones) begin by dreaming of radical and transformative alternatives that may appear impossible. In dystopian times, our last contributions focused on how climate change as crisis is framed and the political work that affords and forecloses certain scenarios.

In this series, we wish to explore what is happening on the other side of the spectrum: how climate utopias and greener societal transitions are imagined and performed; what kind of technoscientific trajectories are proposed as desirable, feasible and equitable and what is foreclosed in such imaginaries and practices? Crucially, as green utopian solutions and interventions are often imagined during crisis and in faraway places (think of conservation of ‘wild nature’ in Africa, or greening far-away deserts as if they are devoid of people and politics (see Weather Makers, a Dutch firm wanting to regreen the Sinai peninsula); or, where to place all these necessary wind turbines and solar panels); whose utopias are being imagined, how can they be decolonial and what is the role of solidarity in such discourses? 

Read the full CFP here