Everything is equally close to the centre, which is why any truly consistent dialectical thought can begin from what looks like the most obscure and ephemeral of phenomena. Theodor Adorno, An Introduction to Dialectics, p. 149.

Who are we?
The Dystopia Project is a collective of scholars drawn together by an interest in furthering our understanding of dystopia. The urgency of our coming together has its roots in the value we place on collective scholarship at a moment of crisis for the institutions of scholarship, and in our insistence on adhering to the repertoire of intellectual practices held in the notion and traditions of critique.

Our motivating object however is dystopia – its history and narrative forms, the generation and reception and mutation of these latter, and their interplay in the conceptualisation of dystopia as a genre, and its own interrelationship with other genres of fiction.

We recognize that we live in a situation of absolute emergency. This emergency impacts directly on all of us in terms of the global context we inhabit, our political and economic realities, on universities and on the other locations in which we live and work. It is our absolute presupposition that any work we do as intellectuals and scholars necessarily also involves intervening in these various horizons as well.

Where are we?

We exist internationally and are open to anyone joining us from anywhere. Our only criteria are that you have a commitment to pursuing knowledge of dystopia as a historical genre, and a commitment to working in a collective fashion. We came into existence at a workshop at the University of Brighton in September 2019 …

When are we?

The understanding of our own present as a moment of tumultuous, multiple, interconnected crises is an understanding which motivates our work. Our widest horizon is the utopian one that late capitalism is unsustainable, and that another way of living is possible. Within that formation, we will use humanities scholarship as a way of both recognising the deformations the present is wreaking on the study of the humanities and those whose workplace it is, and use that scholarship simultaneously to help figure ways out of those deformations. That is we wish to locate our own work in relation to the wider world we live in, yet to locate it also and rigorously against the contemporary movement to ‘post-critique’ in the humanities, and in particular against the contemporary movement to dissolve the political specificity of form and history in Utopian Studies.

What we wish to do?

Our founding principles involve an insistence on the collective nature of any productive scholarship at this time, and on the politicisation of scholarship which critical theory assumes and enhances.

If the urgency of their articulation is an index of the times we live in, our guiding questions are yet historical and pay attention in particular to history’s sedimented presence in the narrative forms the present has inherited. These questions include:

• Why does the present have so many dystopian fictions?
• What is the relationship to utopia – if there indeed continues to be any such relationship at all – in the plethora of these dystopian fictions?
• How do the dystopias of the twenty-first century alter the scholarly history already written on dystopia’s crystallisation and mutations across the twentieth century?
• How can we globalise our approach to dystopian fictions whilst paying attention to the specific trajectories and internal pressures shaping the fictions of any particular place?
• How can we model and understand the escape of the term ‘dystopia’ from the realm of fiction and its deployment in political formations as an adjective to castigate the present or some aspect of the present?