Schedule at a Glance
Tuesday July 12th, 2022 (eve of Conference)
Gregory Claeys, ECR Skills Workshop – 4pm – M2/ Channel 2
Local Hostelry, ECR Meet-and-Greet – 5.30pm – Hobgoblin Pub
Wednesday, July 13th, 2022
Registration – Opens at 8am
Welcome and Opening Remarks: 9-9.30am – Sallis Benney
Break: 11-11.30am (tea and coffee)
Lunch 12.45-1.30pm (lunch)
Break: 3-3.20pm (tea and coffee)
Book Launch/Wine Reception: 6.30pm – 8pm (in-person only)
| A-Session 9.30-11am | B-Session 11.30-12.45pm | C-Session 1.30-3pm | D-Session 3.20-4.50pm | E-Session 5 – 6.30pm |
| Mani-Pedi- Anti- Counter- Festo | Keynote: Raffaella Baccolini | Critical Hopelessness | Crooked Utopia on-Screen | Long Hope |
| The Present is the Ruins of the Future | Histopia 1: Building Utopia on a Critical Basis | Slow Hope and Past Hopes | Hope, Bodies, Chance | |
| Challenges to Hoping | Queering Methods of Hope | Community: Intentional, International, Possible | Post-Humanism, Post-Individualism, Community | |
| Politics and Performance | Round Table – Palgrave Book of Utopian and Dystopian Studies | Meditation for the Unhoused. ca. 22 | The Shadows: Science of Hope | |
| Speculative Fictions On-Screen | William Morris | Utopia as Method to Re-Imagine the Future in Older Age. | ||
| Utopian Performance | ECR Round Table |
Schedule at a Glance: Thursday July 14th, 2022
Break: 10.30 – 10.50 (tea and coffee)
Lunch: 12.20 – 1.20pm (lunch in café)
Break : 2.50 –3.20pm (tea and coffee)
Conference Dinner: 7.30pm.
| A-Session 9-10.30am | B-Session 10.50-12.20pm | C-Session 1.20-2.50pm | D-Session 3.20-4.50pm | E-Session 5-6.30pm |
| Housing Workshop | Utopian Pedagogies | Feminist Speculations | Utopias in History | Screening of Problemos |
| Bodies, Families, Desires. | Technology, Language, Hope | Gothic Marxism | Opening Hope | Catastrophe, Myth, Fiction |
| The Mobilisation of Hope in Activist Groups and Movements | Workshop on Utopia and Humour | Round Table: Reimagining Queer Utopias | Workshop on Utopian Pedagogy | Hope and Fear in Higher Education. |
| Historicising, Textualising Hope | Hope’s Strange Places | Round Table: Becoming Utopian | The Spaces of the Earth | Dystopia or Strange Hopes |
| Utopia Fierce and Gentle | Values of Hope | Reflections on Hope | Hope’s Undoing | Past and Future of Utopian Studies |
| Hope and the University | The Uses of Hope | Figures of Hope | Feminist Writing and Utopianism |
Schedule at a Glance: Friday July 15th, 2022
Break: 10.30-10.45pm (tea and coffee)
Lunch: 12-12.45pm (café for lunch)
Break: 4-4.30pm (tea and coffee)
Finale: Round Table: What Next? 6-7pm M2/ Channel 2.
Goodbyes: Venue (King and Queen Pub). Lecture/Performance – Dr Duckie’s Homemade Mutant Hope Machines 7-9pm
| A-Session 9-10.30am | B-Session 10.45-12pm | C-Session 12.45-2.15pm | D-Session 2.30-4pm | E-Session 4.30-6pm | Finale 6pm |
| Dancefloors and Silly Sissies | Keynote: Jack Halberstam | Utopian Studies Society (Europe) AGM | M2 What Happens to Hope in Dystopia – Round Table/Workshop | Hope’s Styles | Round Table: Where Next? |
| Histopia 2: Dystopian Paradoxes | Culture, Catastrophe, Politics | Speculation, Salvage, Fiction | |||
| Reimagining Academic Freedom | Out of Empire | Architecture’s Imagination | |||
| Hope in Catastrophe | Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Political and Theoretical Forms. | Anti-Utopia and Dystopia | |||
| Theorising Hope, Theorising Utopia | Real Utopia: Foundations for a Participatory Society | Food-Sovereignty, Sustenance, Hope | |||
| Exploring Forms of Hope | ECR Provocations: Working with(out) Hope in HE |
Wednesday July 13th: Day 1
Panels in A-Session – 9.30-11am
A1: A mani-pedi-anti-counter- FESTO for queer screen production: a quatrologue (Remote Session)
Chair: Jonathan Greenaway. Participants: Angie Black, Patrick Kelly, Kim Munro, Stayci Taylor
Room M2/Channel 2
A2: Panel :“The Present is the Ruins of the Future”: Notes on the Half-Life of Hope
Chair: Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck). Participants: Caroline Bassett (Cambridge), Ben Roberts (Sussex) Jo Walton (Sussex).
Room G4/Channel 1
Caroline Bassett
‘“Hope after hope’s ending”?: Nuclear critique revisited’
Ben Roberts
‘Excavating hope: pessimistic fatalism, cyberutopia and media archaeology’
Jo Walton (in-person)
“Cyberutopia in the Postdigital: Praxis, Pranks, and ‘Applied Hope.’”
A3: Panel – Challenges to Hoping (hybrid panel)
Chair: Martin Greenwood. Participants: Joff Bradley, Roland Bluhm, Anna Bugajska.
Room 204/Channel 4
Joff Bradley (remote)
Utopia and the superego
Ronald Bluhm (remote)
Pitfalls of Hoping
Anna Bugajska (in-person)
Hope beyond Human: the Challenge of Techno-Utopias.
A4: Panel: Politics and Performance (in-person panel)
Chair: Darren Webb. Participants: Clare Geraghty, Adam Alston, Clare Chandler
Room 202/ Channel 3
Clare Geraghty (in-person)
Feminist hip hop as a means of enacting hope: queervolucionarias Krudxs Cubensi.
Adam Alston (in-person)
Zombie time: Martin O’Brien’s queerly decadent praxis
Clare Chandler (in-person)
Star-Crossed Utopia and Dissonant Pleasure in & Juliet (2019)
A5: Panel: Speculative Fictions on Screen (hybrid panel)
Chair: Joe Davidson. Presenters: Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga, Heather McKnight and Kate Meakin
Room G62/Channel 5
Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga (remote)
“Amusing Ourselves to Death”: Dystopia as Entertainment, Dystopia of Entertainment
Heather McKnight and Kate Meakin (online and in-person)
The Prefigurative Possibilities of Speculative Television: The Handmaid’s Tale and Utopia Falls
Wednesday July 13th: Day 1
B-Session – 11.30-12.45pm
Raffaella Baccolini
Keynote.
Sallis Benney Theatre
Title: Reclaiming Critical Dystopia, Recovering Hope in Darkness
As an Italian woman who did her graduate work in the United States, and who specialized in American “high” modernist poetry, my approach to utopian studies has been shaped by my cultural and biographical circumstances as well as by my geography. It is therefore a hybrid approach that combines these geographical and historical circumstances with other issues like desire and interest. In particular, my interest in feminist theory and in writings by women has intersected with my belief that good literature is meant to disturb and unsettle readers. I believe that a feeling of being out of place, not at home in the world is a necessary condition of utopia and of the desire to contribute to the transformation of society. It is an approach that has foregrounded from the very beginning issues of genre writing as they intersect with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. Such an approach, however, has and must also come to terms with the political and cultural circumstances that characterize an historical period. Therefore, I will offer a reflection on the genre of dystopia, how it has changed, its constituent elements and their transformations, with a look at its gender dimension and, in particular, the issue of women’s reproductive rights in some recent critical dystopias. In my work, in fact, I have been studying dystopian literature in its formal and thematic features, while trying to look for other modes of articulating horizons of hope. Together with many others, I have come to believe that contemporary dystopian production, in its themes and in its formal aspects, is an example of an oppositional and resisting form of writing, one that maintains hope and a utopian horizon within the pages of dystopia in these very dark times.
Wednesday July 13th: Day 1
Panels in C-Session – 1.30-3pm
C1: Panel – ‘Critical Hope(lessness) and the Utopian/Dystopian dialectic in Drama, Theatre, and Performance’ (in-person panel)
Chair: Patricia McManus Presenters: Aylwyn Walsh, Hakan Gultekin, Mesut Günenç
Room G4/Channel 1
Dr Aylwyn Walsh, University of Leeds, UK (in-person)
Critical hope beyond a ‘good life fantasy’: Arts participation in Imagining Otherwise
Dr Hakan Gultekin, Artvin Coruh University, Turkey (Department of English Language and Literature) (in-person)
No Shoulder to Cry on: Precarity and Hope(lessness) in Nadia Fall’s Home
Dr Mesut Günenç, Adnan Menderes University, Turkey (Department of English Language and Literature) (in-person)
Utopia and Dystopia in Edward Bond’s Dialectical Theatre
C2: Panel – Histopia, Critical Hopes 1 (in-person panel)
Building utopia on critical basis: fictional and historical perspectives
Chair: Javier Álvarez Caballero. Presenters: José Carlos Ferrera, Francisco Paoli Bolio
Room 204/Channel 4
Javier Álvarez Caballero (in-person)
Is Posthumanism the Hope for Utopia? The Fight Against Anthropocentrism. A Posthuman-Eco-anarquist Approach to Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy
José Carlos Ferrera (in-person)
Spanish ecofeminism: a choice for hope
Francisco Paoli Bolio (in-person)
A Mexican utopia
C3: Panel – Queering Methods of Hope (hybrid panel)
Chair: Adam Stock. Presenters: H Howitt, Ibtisam Ahmed, Magdalena Dziurzyńska
Room 202/Channel 3
H Howitt (remote)
How we Fuck and Unfuck the World: Intimacy as Method in Trans Sex Research
Ibtisam Ahmed (in-person)
LIVE, WORK, POSE: queer utopian freedom in the vogue and ballroom scene
Magdelena Dziurzyńska (in-person)
The Future is Queer: Reversed Heterotopia and the Normativity of Queer Spaces in Rafael Grugman’s Nontraditional love
C4: Roundtable: The Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literatures
Room M2/Channel 2
Panel members (all in-person) will include:
· Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Co-editor, Penn State University, and Chair of the panel
· Fátima Vieira, Co-editor, University of Porto
· Laurence Davis, Contributor, University College Cork
· Barnita Bagchi, Contributor, Utrecht University
· Quitterie De Beauregard, Contributor, Sorbonne University
· Liam Benison, Contributor, University of Porto
Wednesday July 13th: Day 1
Panels in D-Session – 3.20-4.50pm
D1: Panel – Crooked Utopia on-Screen (hybrid panel)
Chair: Sean Seeger. Presenters: Anna Bell, Mehdi Achouche, Enrique Meléndez Galán
Room G4/Channel 1
Anna Bell (in-person)
Pessimistic Hope as Rebellion: Fassbinder’s Utopia
Enrique Meléndez Galán (online)
Destroying Heritage/Destroying Hopes: Notes about Architecture, Visual Culture and Speculative Fictions.
Mehdi Achouche (in-person)
Problemos and the Anti-Utopian Satire on Screen
D2: Panel – Slow Hope and Past Hopes (hybrid panel)
Chair: Diane Morgan. Presenters: Arthur Blaim, Zsolt Czigányik, José Eduardo Reis
Room M2/Channel 2
Artur Blaim (remote).
Constructing a Utopian/Dystopian Academy: The Case of the Polish “Constitution for Science and Higher Education”
Zsolt Czigányik (in-person)
Utopia and democracy in an East Central European perspective.
José Eduardo Reis (in-person)
The last of the soviets or the end of the great utopia.
D3: Panel – Community: Intentional, International, Possible (hybrid panel)
Chair: Anitra Nelson. Presenters: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Vijayita Prajapati, Teuvo Peltoniemi.
Room 202/Channel 3
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (online)
Alternatives Ideas of Europe: An Anarcho-Pacifist Critique of Europe’s Liberal Internationalism
Vijayita Prajapati (in-person)
Educational Significance of an Intentional Community
Teuvo Peltoniemi (online)
The Finnish Utopian Communities compared to Classic Utopians.
D4: Workshop: Meditation for the Unhoused: A design-based workshop and visioning exercise.
Facilitator: Elise O’Brien (in-person)
Room 204 (maximum capacity for workshop is 22)
D5: Panel – William Morris (in-person panel)
Chair: Laurence Davis. Presenters: Michael Robertson, Owen Holland
Room G64/Channel 6
Michael Robertson (in-person)
William Morris’s Utopian Designs
Owen Holland (in-person)
Tragedy and Revolution in William Morris’s The Pilgrims of Hope
D6: Workshop – An Exercise in Utopian Performance
Facilitator: Sanja Vodovnik (online – online participation only for this workshop).
Channel 5
Wednesday July 13th: Day 1
Panels in E-Session – 5-6.30pm
E1: Dialogue – Long Hope.
Chair: Patricia McManus. Participants: Darko Suvin, Phillip E. Wegner.
Room M2/ Channel 2
Philip E. Wegner (remote)
Hope, Failure and Bad Compromise
Darko Suvin (remote)
For the Long Hope: a Counter-Project, via Prometheus.
E2: Panel – Hope, Bodies, Chance (hybrid panel)
Chair: Ville Louekari. Participants: Peter Conlin, William Sokoloff
Room G64/Channel 6
Peter Conlin (in-person)
Hope, sparks and the politics of meaningful uncertainty
William Sokoloff (remote)
Radical Queer Utopianism
E3: Panel – Post-Humanism, Post-Individualism, Community (hybrid panel)
Chair: Andrew Bridges. Participants: Stefania Rutigliano, Michael Larson, Boyarkina Iren
Room 202/Channel 3
Stefania Rutigliano (in-person)
Which hope for the posthuman?
Michael Larson (in-person)
Community in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy
Dr Boyarkina Iren (online)
Hope, post-individualism, and communism in the works of Greg Egan and Olaf Stapledon
E4: Panel – The Shadows: Science, and Hope (remote panel)
Chair: Anna Bugajska. Participants: Kenneth Hanshew, Marta Korbel, Evanir Pavloski
Room G62/Channel 5
Kenneth Hanshew (remote)
Hope in contemporary Czech SF?
Marta Korbel (remote)
Pioneers of Tomorrow: Science as the Source of Utopian Hope in Soviet Science Fiction
Evanir Pavloski (remote)
Hopeful Dystopias? Looking for Ways to Cast some Light into the Shadows.
E5: Panel: Using ‘Utopia as Method’, to Reimagine the Future in Older Age.
Chair:Vijayita Prajapati. Participants: Jade Elizabeth French, Melanie Lovatt, Valerie Wright (online panel)
Room 204/Channel 4
Note: this is a collective session on the topic.
Paper 1: Using creative methods in qualitative research
Paper 2: Deconstructing ageism in intergenerational reading groups
Paper 3: Creating counter-narratives: Forum theatre and the future in older age.
E6: Early-Career Scholars’ Round Table – Career stage, Intersectionality and Borders: Exploring possibilities and challenges of our roles as ECRs and marginalised researchers in the becoming-diverse of utopian studies.
Chair and Co-Ordinator: Rhiannon Firth. Participants: Ibtisam Ahmed, Heather Alberro, Allison Norris, Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Eleonora Rossi, Athira Unni.
Room G4/ Channel 1
Thursday July 14th: Day 2
Panels in A-Session – 9 – 10.30am
A1: Panel: Hope and/in Housing (in-person panel).
Chair: Helen Bartlett. Participants: MyFan Jordan, Helen Bartlett, Martyn Holmes, Dave Solfed and Fearghus Solfed.
Room G4/Channel 1
Dave Solfed and Fearghus Solfed (in-person)
Brighton Solidarity Federation Housing Union
MyFan Jordan (in-person)
Neuroqueering Cohousing?
Helen Bartlettand Martyn Holmes (in-person)
Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust
A2: Panel – Bodies, Families, Desires (hybrid panel)
Chair: Owen Holland. Participants: Mike Mayne, Clare Fisher, Sara C. Motta and Nikolett Puskas
Room 202/ Channel 3
Mike Mayne (remote)
Family Abolition and Queer Utopia
Clare Fisher (In-Person)
Utopia Without Bodies? Reading Theory, Writing Fiction, and (Not) Buying Jeans.
Duologue: Sara C Motta (online) and Nikolett Puskas (in-person)
Threading space – dignity against and beyond hope.
A3: Panel – The Mobilisation of Hope in Activist Groups and Movements (in-person panel)
Chair – Adam Stock. Presenters: Darren Webb, Rhiannon Firth, Heather Alberro
Room M2/ Channel 2
Darren Webb (in-person)
From Critical to Transformative Hope
Rhiannon Firth (in-person)
Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid, Degrowth and Utopian Value
Heather Alberro (in-person)
‘My Friends are Dying’: Critical Modalities of Hope in Terrestrial Utopian Movements’
A4: Panel: Historicising, Textualising Hope (hybrid panel)
Chair: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor. Participants: Liam J. L. Knight, Harry Warwick, Olga Kubinska.
Room G64/Channel 6
Liam J. L. Knight (in-person)
Hope in Dystopian Endotexts
Harry Warwick (remote)
Cathedral of Power: Battersea Power Station in Dystopian Culture
Olga Kubinska (in-person)
Hope steeped in pessimism: 21st-century visual forms of remembrance of the Jewish past in Poland
A5: Panel – Utopia Fierce and Gentle (in-person panel)
Chair: Martin Greenwood. Participants: Jim Block, Ville Louekari, Athira Unni
Room 204/Channel 4
Jim Block (in-person)
A Fierce Call for a Gentle Utopia
Ville Louekari (in-person)
Utopian hope, repression, and desire
Athira Unni (in-person)
Decolonising Utopia: Hope as A Rallying Point for Non-Western Models in Utopian Studies.
A6: Panel: Hope and the University (online panel)
Chair: Manuel J. Sousa Oliveira. Participants: Jacqueline Dutton, René Rejon, Claudia Sandberg, Sophie Dungan, Stefan Fuchs, Rebecca Bell and Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz
Room G62/Channel 5
Paper: Teaching Utopia in Collaborative Modes: Arts Discovery @ The University of Melbourne.
Presenters: Jacqueline Dutton, René Rejon, Claudia Sandberg, Sophie Dungan, Stefan Fuchs (remote: 30-minute presentation)
Paper: Re-imagining the university through hope in pedagogy.
Presenters: Dr Rebecca Bell (online) and Dr Ana Baeza Ruiz (online)
Thursday July 14th: Day 2
Panels in B-Session – 10.50 – 12.20pm
B1: Round Table – Utopian Pedagogies: from Practice to Theory (hybrid session)
Co-Chairs – Laurence Davis and Tim Waterman
Room G4/ Channel 1
Jacqueline Dutton (remote) University of Melbourne
Tim Waterman (in-person) University College London
Laurence Davis (in-person) University College Cork
Heather McKnight (remote) Magnetic Ideals Collective
Darren Webb (in-person) University of Sheffield.
Siân Adiseshiah (remote) Loughborough University
B2: Panel – Technology, Language, Hope (in-person panel)
Chair: Czigányik Zsolt. Participants: Elisa Fortunato, Heather Alberro, Andrew Bridges
Room 204/ Channel 4
Elise Fortunato (in-person)
Beyond Ecological Trauma. Hope and Lot in Aldous Huxley’s Theory of Language.
Heather Alberro (in-person)
H.G Wells, Earthly and Post-Terrestrial Futures.
Andrew Bridges (in-person)
A Secular Theology Emerging from Walden Pond: Groundwork for Contemporary Hope in the Technological Singularity.
B3: Workshop – Debating Humour in Utopia (hybrid session)
Facilitators: Christopher Olk, University Roma Tre (remote), and Tatjana Söding, Lund University (in-person)
Room 202/Channel 3
B4: Panel: Hope’s Strange Places (in-person panel)
Chair: Marta Olivi. Participants: Katie Stone, Manuel Sousa Oliveira, Beniamin Kłaniecki.
Room M2/ Channel 2
Katie Stone (in-person)
Hungering for Utopia: Rejecting Deprivation in Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk (2001)
Manuel Sousa Oliveira (in-person)
“Going Westward to the Sunrise”: The Utopian Potential of Loss
Beniamin Kłaniecki (in-person)
Queering death and utopias of hope: Roy in conversation with Emezi.
B5: Panel – Values of Hope (hybrid panel)
Chair: Martin Greenwood. Participants: Anitra Nelson, Terry Leahy, Dario Altobelli
G64/ Channel 6.
Anitra Nelson (in-person)
A Political Economy of Hope
Terry Leahy (remote)
The Community Mode of Production and Real Valuism: Concepts and Strategies
Dario Altobelli (remote)
“The fatherland is and must be not the country of its fathers, but the country of its children”. Hope and responsibility in a twilight world.
B6: The Uses of Hope (hybrid panel)
Chair: Ville Louekari. Presenters: Richard Hull, Divya Singh, Ross Sparkes.
G62/ Channel 5
Richard Hull (in-person)
Hope is great but don’t forget the Backlash: How do we do Defence & Security in Utopian ways?
Divya Singh (remote)
Educating Resistance: Hope in Dalit Theory
Ross Sparkes (in-person)
Turned out of Paradise: Cruel Optimism and Utopias of Abundance
Thursday July 14th: Day 2
Panels in C-Session – 1.20-2.50pm
C1: Panel – Feminist Speculations (remote panel)
Chair: Inna Sukhenko. Participants: Chiara Xausa, Valentina Romanzi, Tânia Cerqueira
Room G62/ Channel 5
Chiara Xausa (Remote)
The Radical Imagination of Feminist Environmental Humanities: Interweaving Theory and Speculative Fiction
Dr Valentina Romanzi (Remote)
“Faint Hopes Are Better Than None.” Mapping Hope in Margaret Atwood’s Gileadean Novels
Tânia Cerqueira (Remote)
“If I let myself hope…”: Memory and Hope in Donna Barba Higuera’s The Last Cuentista
C2: Panel – Gothic Marxism and the Reopening of the Possible, Gothic Marxism and the Hope in Horror (hybrid panel)
Chair: Megen de Bruin-Molé. Participants: Frank R. Lopes (remote), Jonathan Greenaway (in-person), Kyle Kern (in-person).
Room 202/ Channel 3
C3: Roundtable – Reimagining Queer Utopias: Voices from South Asia (hybrid event)
Chair: Anitra Nelson. Participants: Ibtisam Ahmed, Simoni Agarwal, Rajeev Anand, Buttertoes.
Room G4/ Channel 1
C4: Roundtable: Becoming Utopian as Hopeful Praxis (hybrid session).
Co-Chairs: Tom Moylan (remote) and Heather Alberro (in-person). Participants: Siân Adiseshiah (remote), Heather Alberro (in-person), Julia Ramírez-Blanco (tbc), Burcu Kuheylan (remote), Adam Stock (in-person), Patricia McManus (in-person), Tom Moylan (remote).
Room M2/ Channel 2
C5: Panel – Reflections on Hope (remote panel)
Chair: Nicole Pohl. Participants: Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim, Léo Karam Tietboehl, Justyna Galant.
Room G64/Channel 6.
Ludmiła Gruszewska-Blaim (remote)
The Soviet/Russian dream that goes out to shape the world: The Painted Bird live, in print, and on screen
Léo Karam Tietboehl (remote)
What Can We Hope For? A reflection on the practice of utopia
Justyna Galant (remote)
Estrangement as a Utopian Tool in Stefan Themerson’s Works.
C6: Panel – Figures of Hope: artistic productions in the 21st century (remote panel)
Chair: Ildney Cavalcanti. Participants: Paulo Rogério Stella and Daniel Adelino Costa Oliveira da Cruz, Felipe Benicio de Lima, Fabiana Gomes de Assis, João Victor da Silva, Elton Luiz Aliandro Furlanetto.
Room 204/ Channel 4
Paulo Rogério Stella and Daniel Adelino Costa Oliveira da Cruz
Three Lives, Three Objects: A Snapshot of the Pandemic.
Felipe Benicio de Lima
Politics and Poetics of Multiperspectivity in Neodystopic Fiction.
Fabiana Gomes de Assis
Queertopias: Dreamed Corporealities in Contemporary Narratives.
João Victor da Silva
Who’s afraid of Linn da Quebrada? Utopian inventions of a ‘tranny fag.’
Elton Luiz Aliandro Furlanetto
Translating Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy into Brazilian Portuguese: overcoming the gendering of language.
Ildney Cavalcanti
“The Camille Stories”: reflections on Donna Haraway’s multispecies utopianism.
Thursday July 14th: Day 2
Panels in D-Session – 3.20-4.50pm
D1: Panel – Utopias in History (remote panel)
Chair: Ross Sparkes. Participants: Arianna Bove, Annette M. Magid.
Room G64/ Channel 6
Arianna Bove (Remote)
Hope springs eternal
Annette M. Magid (Remote)
Looking for a Hopeful Resolution
D2: Panel – Opening Hope (hybrid panel)
Chair: Aylwyn Walsh. Participants: Kelsey P. Mason, Giulia Degano, Jennifer Raum
Room G62/ Channel 5
Kelsey P. Mason (remote)
Who’s Leading Us Down the Road to Nowhere? Coding for Utopian and Dystopian Rhetorics in Literature and Life Writing
Giulia Degano (remote)
Hope and Borders: two methods in dialogue. An Interdisciplinary perspective about contemporary identity from Miyazaki’s Method of Hope and Mezzadra and Neilson’s Border as Method.
Jennifer Raum (in-person)
Stepping in the Same River Twice: Utopian Worlds in Motion
D3: Workshop – Utopian Pedagogy
Participants: Pilvi Porkola (in-person facilitator)
Note: this is a sixty-minute workshop
Room 202/ Channel 3
D4: Panel – The Bodies and Spaces of Earth (hybrid panel)
Chair: Owen Holland. Participants: Anna Torres Mallma, Sierra Getz, Emrah Atasoy and Marta Komsta.
Room 204/ Channel 4
Sierra Getz (in-person)
Dystopias and Disasters: Examining the Apocalyptic Nature of War within Fahrenheit 451.
Anna Torres Mallma (remote)
Broken Bodies Walking Dystopic Cities in contemporary Latin American narrative
Emrah Atasoy (in-person) and Marta Komsta (remote)
Straying in the Anthropocene: Critical Hope in Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness
D5: Hope’s Undoing (hybrid panel)
Chair: Patricia McManus. Participants: Richard Boyechko, Sheryl M. Medlicott, Marta Olivi and Beatrice Masi
Room G4/ Channel 1
Richard Boyechko (remote)
Between Hope and Despair: Intentional Performativity and Impermanence
Sheryl M. Medlicott (In-person)
New Forms of Hope: Environmental Literary Utopias in the Twenty-First Century
Marta Olivi and Beatrice Masi (in-person)
The hermeneutics of suicide, from critical dystopias to contemporary feminist and capitalistic dystopian societies: a comparison between Notes from a Coma (2005) and The Book of X (2020) .
D6: Panel – Feminist Writing and Utopianism (in-person panel)
Chair: Michael Larson. Participants: Matthew Wilson, Sarah Lohmann, Joana Caetano
Room M2/Channel 2
Matthew Wilson (in-person)
Feminist dreamscapes: on the Positivist utopian aesthetics of Jane May Style nee Locke
Sarah Lohmann (in-person)
“True voyage is return”: the Critical Temporality of Utopian Hope in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country
Joana Caetano (in-person)
Is subversive ambiguity utopian? Virginia Woolf and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Gender Fluidity and Queerness.
Thursday July 14th: Day 2
Panels in E-Session – 5-6.30pm
E1: Screening of Problemos (tbc)
Room 202/ Channel 3
E2: Panel – Catastrophe, Myth, Fiction (remote panel)
Chair: Inna Sukhenko. Participants: Ali Zar Asghar, Eleonara Rossi, Gabriel Saldías Rossel
Room G62/ Channel 5
Ali Zar Asghar (remote)
Exegesis of Varna Through the Lens of Social Dominance Theory in Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways.
Elonora Rossi (remote)
After-oil Utopianism and Africanfuturism in Contemporary SF: Reading Nnedi Okorafor
Gabriel Saldías Rossel (remote)
The Crisis of Catastrophic Hope in Recent Latin American Literature.
E3: Workshop: ‘Hope and Fearin Creative Higher Education’
Facilitators: Chris Nunn and Lee-Jane Bennion-Nixon (in-person).
Room G4/ Channel 1
E4: Panel – Dystopia, or, Strange Hopes (hybrid panel)
Chair: Liam Knight. Participants: Braden H. Hammer, Aristidis V. Agoglossakis Foley, Andrea Burgos-Mascarell.
Room 204/ Channel 4
Braden H. Hammer (in-person)
Title: Len Deighton and the Utopian Tradition
Aristidis V. Agoglossakis Foley (in-person)
The Unnecessary Existence of Dystopian Hope.,
Andrea Burgos-Mascarell (remote)
Young adult dystopian fiction and utopian dialogue.
E5: Panel- Past and Future of Utopian Studies.
Chair: Laurence Davis. Participants: Antonis Balasopoulos, Caroline Edwards, Julia Ramírez Blanco, Adam Stock, Heather Alberro.
Room M2/ Channel 2
Antonis Balasopoulos – ‘Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive Utopianism’
Caroline Edwards – ‘Decolonising Utopian Studies.’
Julia Ramírez Blanco – ‘Hispanic Utopian Studies and Prefigurative Politics’
Adam Stock – ‘Funding Utopia.’
Heather Alberro – ‘World-building After the End: Terrestrial Utopias of the Here and Now.
Friday July 15th: Day 3
Panels in A-Session – 9-10.30am
A1: Round Table: Dancefloors and Silly Sissies: Queer Performance and Queer Futures (in-person session)
Chair: Joe Parslow. Presenters: Ben Burratta, Alyson Campbell, Stephen Farrier, Nando Messias, Joe Parslow
Room G4/Channel 1
A2: Histopia – Critical Hopes 2 – Panel: Dystopian paradoxes: where is the light? (in-person session)
Chair: Elisabetta Di Minico. Participants: Francisco José Martínez Mesa, Ana Clara Rey Segovia.
Room M2/ Channel 2
Elisabetta Di Minico (in-person)
The destruction and the resistance of hope and otherness in dystopia.
Francisco José Martínez Mesa (in-person)
From hope to gratification: an approach to the complex relationship between dystopia and the audience.
Ana Clara Rey Segovia (in-person)
From dystopia to utopia? Possible utopian openings in contemporary dystopias.
A3: Reimagining Academic Freedom
Chair: Sierra Getz. Participants: Heather McKnight, Alice Corble, Audrey Verma.
G62/Channel 5
A4: Panel – Hope in Catastrophe (in-person panel)
Chair: Emrah Atasoy. Participants: Nicole Pohl, Diane Morgan, Joe P. L. Davidson
Room 202/ Channel 3
Nicole Pohl (in-person)
Utopia and hope(lessness):
Diane Morgan (in-person)
“The Be All and End All”: “Is this the Promised End?”, “Or Image of that Horror?”
Joe P. L. Davidson (in-person)
Two cheers for collapse? Societal collapse, climate-induced breakdown, and catastrophic hope
A5: Panel – Theorising Hope, Theorising Utopia (hybrid panel)
Chair: Patricia McManus. Presenters: Andrew Milner, Martin Greenwood, Greg Claeys
Room G64/ Channel 6
Andrew Milner (remote)
Progress versus Catastrophe? Utopian Hope in Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin.
Martin Greenwood (in-person)
The Post Office versus the Army as a vehicle of utopian hope: Real utopia as a method in the search for revolutionary dual power
Greg Claeys (remote)
Defining Realistic Utopias.
A6: Exploring Forms of Hope (hybrid panel)
Chair: Richard Hull. Presenters: Morna Laing, Inna Sukhenko, Rachel Bosler.
Room 204/ Channel 4
Morna Laing (in-person)
The ‘Green Cloak’ of Fashion Media: Utopia, Micro-utopia, and Iterative Hope
Inna Sukhenko (remote)
‘Slow Hope’ and Nuclear Knowledge Management in Nuclear Fiction: On ‘Hope Narrative’ in Communicating a Nuclear Disaster.
Rachel Bosler (in-person)
Can we be Radically Happy in the face of Climate Breakdown.
Friday July 15th: Day 3
Jack Halberstam – Keynote.
Sallis Benney Theatre
Title: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse
In my recent book, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, I proposed that wildness is a deeply ambivalent form of power, one that cannot be harnessed neatly by human intention but that spins away from human will towards other forms of engagement. I offer ambiguous figures who stand in for the potential for wildness to either unmake the world or become a site of ferocious and often erotic appropriation.
In new work, under the title of unworlding, I ask whether we can think with wildness on behalf of different ways of engaging with non-human life. Rather than holding out for new worlds, revitalized notions of life, or remade utopian dreams, my project begins from the premise that utopian aspirations as we currently conceive of them can only proceed by way of unworlding, world unmaking in which concepts such as the human, subject, object, animal, vegetative are tipped out of their hierarchical formations and disordered in meaning and in their relations to one another.
Friday July 15th: Day 3
C-Session – 12.45-2.15pm
Utopian Studies Society (Europe) Annual General Meeting (AGM).
M2/ Channel 2
Friday, July 15th: Day 3
Panels in D-Session – 2.30-4pm
D1: Flash Papers, Round Table and Workshop – What Happens to Hope in Dystopia: Anarchism and Architecture Beyond Utopia (hybrid session).
Chair and Co-Ordinator: Nathaniel Coleman. Participants: David Boyd, Dora Farrelly, Holly Veitch, Rob Lloyd, Muhammad Ogunniyi, Ufuk Ersoy, Inês Nascimento, Sarah Al Hasan
Room M2/ Channel 2
D2: Round Table – Culture, Catastrophe, Politics, (hybrid session)
Chair: Patricia McManus. Participants: Heather Alberro (in-person), Mark Bould (remote), Richard Seymour (remote).
Room G4/ Channel 1
D3: Panel – Out of Empire (hybrid panel)
Chair: Emrah Atasoy. Participants: Barnita Bagchi, Gabriella Vöő, Maria Luiza Diniz Milanez
Room 202/ Channel 3
Barnita Bagchi (in-person)
Utopian Hope in Dystopia: A Consideration of British and South Asian Speculative Fictions from Feminist and Decolonizing Perspectives
Gabriella Vöő (Remote)
Gardens in the Dunes: Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Sober Utopia.”
Maria Luiza Diniz Milanez ( remote)
A Flicker of Light: Atwood’s Gilead women
D4: Panel – Utopia and Anti-Utopia: Political and Theoretical Forms (hybrid panel)
Chair: Ross Clarke. Participants: Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Sorin Antohi, Onur Acaroğlu and Ufuk Gürbüzdal
Room 204/ Channel 4
Alexandre Christoyannopoulos (remote)
Pacifism and Nonviolence: Delineating the contours of a new research agenda.
Sorin Antohi (remote)
Putin’s Dystopia: Russian State Utopianism, Eurasianism, Apocalypse.
Onur Acaroğlu (in-person) and Ufuk Gürbüzdal (remote)
Transitional Politics from Fatsa to Dersim: Past and Present Socialist Governance in Turkey.
D5: Real Utopia: Foundation for a Participatory Society (remote panel)
Chair: Anitra Nelson. Participants: Real Utopia Team: Eugene Nulman, Michael Albert, Alexandria Shaner.
Room G64/Channel 6
Eugene Nulman (remote)
Real Utopia: Participatory Theory
Michael Albert (remote)
Real Utopian: Participatory Vision
Alexandreia Shaner (remote)
Real Utopian: Participatory Strategy
Friday, July 15th: Day 3
Panels in E-Session – 4.30-6pm
E1: Panel – Hope’s Styles (hybrid panel)
Chair: Manuel J. Sousa Oliveira. Presenters: Regina Martin, Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, Pavla Veselá
Room G62/Channel 5
Regina Martin (remote)
The Profound Silence of Hope in Literary Realism
Andrzej Stuart-Thompson (remote)
A Humanity of Cockroaches and a Gesturality of Dolphins: New Worlds for Nonhuman People in Ecotopian Portuguese Poetry
Pavla Veselá (remote)
Words in the Apocalypse: From “Speech Sounds” to Earthseed
E2: Panel – Speculation, Salvage, Fiction (in-person panel)
Chair: Andrew Bridges. Presenters: Daniel Davison-Vecchione, Sean Seeger, Megen de Bruin-Molé.
Room 204/Channel 4
Daniel Davison-Vecchione (in-person)
A modern-tragic kind of hope: Max Weber and dystopian fiction
Sean Seeger (In-Person)
“A living reminder of William Morris”: Yanis Varoufakis’s Another Now and the Utopian Socialist Novel
Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé (in-person)
‘Salvaging’ Utopia: Building Activist Imaginaries Against Hope and Futurity.
E3: Panel – Architecture’s Imagination (hybrid panel)
Chair: Emrah Atasoy. Presenters: Franziska Kopf, Inês Nascimento
Room G64/ Channel 6
Franziska Kopf (in-person)
Utopia as a Hope of Architectural Mediation
Inês Nascimento (remote)
Searching For Utopia In Portuguese Architecture Education: Dialogues And Visions About Its (Non) Place In The Academy.
E4: Panel – Anti-Utopia and Dystopia (hybrid panel)
Chair: Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor. Participants: Mary Cook, Liam Benison, Meltem Dağcı
Room 202/ Channel 3
Mary Cook (in-person)
Upside-down and scattered: The representation of Oceania in the anti-utopian works of Robida and Souvestre.
Liam Benison (in-person)
Hope and Time in Premodern and Modern Utopia.
Meltem Dağcı (remote)
Political Perspective on Hope as the Representation of Resistance in Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction.
E5: Food-Sovereignty, Sustenance, Hope (hybrid panel).
Chair: Tim Waterman. Participants: Piotr Szpunar, Adrien Plomteux, Dupla Molcajete [Beatriz Paz and Zoë Heyn-Jones], Alessandra Piccoli, Carlo Murer.
Room M2/ Channel 2
Piotr Szpunar (remote)
Mediating Hope: Memory, Circulation, Storage.
Adrien Plomteux (in-person)
Hope for avoiding ecological collapse? Imagining pathways towards sustainable futures based on “frugal abundance.”
Dupla Molcajete (Beatriz Paz and Zoë Heyn-Jones (remote))
Prefigurative Food Sovereignty: Indigenous Knowledge and Technologies of Care.
Alessandra Piccoli and Carlo Murer
Alternative Food Networks as Radical Utopias.
E6: ECR Panel/Provocations – Working with(out) Hope in Higher-Education (hybrid panel)
Chair and Co-Ordinator: Allison Norris. Participants: Phil Hedges, Nicola Field
Room G4/Channel 1
Allison Norris (remote)
Producing Hope from Despair: Autoethnographic Notes on the Affective Labour of Optimism
Phil Hedges (remote)
Quit lit and desertion, resistance and hope.
Nicola Field (in-person)
Recovering (through) Solidarity: fighting for the future of knowledge itself.
Friday 15th of July
Finale: Round Table: What Next? 6-7pm M2/ Channel 2.
7-9pm; Goodbyes: Venue (King and Queen Pub) Dr. Duckie (see details in image below)
Lecture/Performance – Dr Duckie’s Homemade Mutant Machines