Entre los pioneros del socialismo utópico fue relevante el grupo fourierista que se formó en Cádiz en torno a Joaquín Abreu. Este grupo planeó en 1841 construir un falansterio siguiendo las ...indicaciones de Charles Fourier, que habría sido el primero del mundo. Bajo la dirección de Manuel Sagrario de Beloy, eligieron como emplazamiento de esta comunidad modelo, que debía abrir una nueva era para la humanidad, un paraje cercano a Jerez de la Frontera, que reunía todas las condiciones previstas por Fourier. La evaluación de aquel proyecto, finalmente fallido, permite reflexionar sobre el “buen lugar” que proponía la utopía societaria.
Dans son roman 2084. La fin du monde, Boualem Sansal use des deux données incontournables de l’écriture romanesque, le temps et l’espace, pour critiquer sa société. L’intrigue et les personnages ne ...sont nécessaires que pour interroger la dimension spatiotemporelle où ils évoluent. Cet article, en se plaçant dans une perspective géocritique, vise à interroger les modalités de la conversion de l’historique et du géographique pour montrer l’obsolescence du monolithisme de l’utopie que promeut le discours de l’État et restituer au concept de l’utopie sa valence polysémique. Sansal affranchit dans ce récit la trame narrative du tracé rectiligne du texte.
In his novel 2084. The end of the world, Boualem Sansal uses the two essential facts of novel writing, time and space, to criticize his society. The plot and the characters are only necessary to ...question the spatiotemporal dimension in which they evolve. This article, from a geocritical perspective, aims to question the modalities of the conversion of the historical and the geographical to show the obsolescence of the monolithism of utopia promoted by the discourse of the State and to restore to the concept of utopia its polysemic valence. In this story, Sansal frees the narrative from the rectilinear outline of the text.
This article focuses on the relationship between the sociology of utopia and Black visions of liberation. Influential figures from Karl Mannheim to Ruth Levitas have effectively demonstrated the ...value of a utopian perspective for sociology. However, the African American tradition of utopianism has been largely overlooked in this literature. I argue that the Black standpoint forces a rethinking of the sociological understanding of utopia. More specifically, while most sociologists of utopia straightforwardly associate the desire for a better world with the future, the Black tradition proposes a more expansive understanding of utopia’s temporality. Building on visions of new worlds advanced by WEB Du Bois and the movement for reparations for slavery, I suggest that Black utopia involves a glance backwards to the past, such that the image of a better future is accompanied by the memory of the catastrophe of slavery.
Throughout history, people have expressed the desire for an ideal society—a utopia. These imagined societies have motivated action for social change. Recent research has demonstrated this ...motivational effect among ordinary people in English-speaking countries, but we know little about the specific content of ordinary people’s utopian visions in different cultures. Here we report that a majority of samples from four countries—Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States—converge on a small number of utopian visions: a Modern Green utopia, a Primitivist utopia, a Futurist utopia, and a Religious utopia. Although the prevalence of these utopia profiles differed across countries, there was a cross-cultural convergence in utopian visions. These shared visions may provide common ground for conversations about how to achieve a better future across cultural borders.
Digital education utopia Bayne, Sian
Learning, media & technology/Learning, media and technology,
07/2024, Letnik:
49, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This paper uses Levitas's (2013) 'utopia as method' as a way to approach the histories of digital education and its utopian possibilities. The themes of emergence, openness and desire are woven ...through the three modes of Levitas's method. First, an archaeological analysis considers the relationship between digital education, lifelong learning and utopia in the political programmes of UNESCO, OECD and the UK government. Second, Levitas's 'utopia as ontology' considers how critical digital education might help move us from the paradigm of the locked-down 'data subject' within a human capital model of education toward emergent and more-than-human ways of understanding. Third, the method's architectural phase is used to explore how a future for digital education might be imagined through the themes of ecopedagogy, diversity of knowledge and the end of institutions. The paper argues that the new twenty-first century utopian imagination might help us to imagine and build better futures for digital education.
This article examines the role of discourses about new media technology and the web in the rise of the 5-Star Movement (Movimento 5 Stelle, or M5S) in Italy. Founded by comedian and activist Beppe ...Grillo and web entrepreneur Gianroberto Casaleggio in 2009, this movement succeeded in becoming the second largest party at the 2013 national elections in Italy. This article aims to discuss how elements of digital utopia and web-centric discourses have been inserted into the movement’s political message, and how the construction of the web as a myth has shaped the movement’s discourse and political practice. The 5-Star Movement is compared and contrasted with other social and political movements in western countries which have displayed a similar emphasis on new media, such as the Occupy movement, the Indignados movement, and the Pirate Parties in Sweden and Germany. By adopting and mutating cyber-utopian discourses from the so-called Californian ideology, the movement symbolically identifies itself with the web. The traditional political establishment is associated with “old” media (television, radio, and the printed press), and represented as a “walking dead,” doomed to be superseded and buried by a web-based direct democracy.
"There's still a world" Markus Schwarz
Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies,
06/2024, Letnik:
5, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In Catherynne M. Valente's The Past Is Red, the world as we know it has already drowned. However, even after the apocalypse, traces of extractive capitalism – responsible for the destruction of the ...planet in the first place – are still lingering on as the novella is set in Garbagetown, a floating habitat of waste that emerged from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This article takes this rubbish as its starting point and examines what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls our "anticipated history of ruins" through the lenses of utopian theory and salvage-Marxism. By conceptualizing waste as one of the most visible markers of the Capitalocene (Moore), I argue that it is not only a planet's resources that are considered disposable in a capitalist economy but also some of its inhabitants. The analysis focuses on the novella's main character Tetley, who, in contrast to her fellow citizens, attempts to locate beauty in the ruins and has hope – not for salvation but for the broken world. By reading Tetley as a salvagepunk character, this article nods towards a different utopian horizon in The Past Is Red, one that is not defined by solastalgia (Albrecht) for the past or the hope for a future Eden but as a praxis of becoming post-apocalyptic, by learning to "stay with the trouble" (Haraway) of a world built out of trash.
There is a new sensibility to the concept of the future in recent writings in the human and social sciences. The modern idea of the future is undergoing a tremendous rupture today such that older or ...taken-for-granted assumptions about it can no longer be left unscrutinized. While much of the new interest in the future is about events yet to come – and the spectre of catastrophe looms large in such thinking – the challenge for social theory is to understand how the future should be conceptualized today and how it relates to other concepts, such as space, hope, possibility and utopia. Some of the major controverses about how the future should be conceptualized can be summed up around the following debates, which are explored in this introductory article: the question of the temporality of the future, the extent to which the future is open, whether utopia has been superseded by dystopia and the implications of posthumanism especially in the context of the emergence of new technologies that have far-reaching implications for the human condition.
Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of ...urbanization and sustainable development. In India, in particular, there has been a move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. Using the case of Dholera, the first Indian smart city, I examine how global models of smart cities are provincialized in the regional state of Gujarat through local histories, politics and laws. First, I argue that Dholera smart city is part of a longer genealogy of utopian urban planning that emerged as a response to the challenges of development and modernity in post-independent India. Second, that Dholera highlights a shift towards an ‘entrepreneurial urbanization’ in a regional state interested in scaling up a ‘Gujarat model of development’ for emulation at the scale of the nation. Finally, that in Dholera ‘speed’ is a relative term across its scales of manifestation from the global to local, where short ‘bursts of speed’ in conceptualization and investment is matched by significant ‘bottlenecks’ via local protests. The article concludes that Dholera’s fault lines are built into its utopian imaginings, which prioritizes urbanization as a business model rather than a model of social justice.