This article offers an analysis of FIFA’s Football for Hope (FFH) movement with a particular focus on the 20 Centres for 2010 Campaign that was connected to the 2010 World Cup, and the FFH Festivals ...held during the 2010 and 2014 World Cups. Using document analysis and observations made during the FFH Festival at the 2014 World Cup and drawing on Levitas’ (
2013) Utopia as Method, this article analyzes claims made by FIFA that football can bring hope and build a better future. Ultimately, the hope that FIFA promotes, and their imagined future is one that is essentially predetermined and is based on the current status quo. However, FFH through their documents and their festival, also present glimpses of potentially transformative alternatives.
To Fail at Scale Cross, Jamie; Street, Alice
Social anthropology,
06/2022, Volume:
30, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
English Abstract:
Humanitarian entrepreneurs seek to do well and do good by developing goods and services that directly address the world’s most intractable problems. In this article we explore the ...expectations built into two of their products: a point-of-care diagnostic device and a solar-powered lantern. We show how these objects materialise both a minimalist ethic of care and a maximalist commitment to universal access for health and energy. Such maximalist commitments, we propose, are fundamentally utopian. The developers of these humanitarian goods do not envision their objects as stop-gap solutions or ‘band-aids’ for entrenched systemic failures but rather as the building blocks for new kinds of universal infrastructures that are delivered through the market. We trace the work involved in scaling-up the humanitarian effects of these devices through processes of design, manufacturing and distribution. For humanitarian entrepreneurs, we argue, to fail at delivering expectations is to fail at scale.
French Abstract:
Les entrepreneurs humanitaires cherchent à faire bien et à faire du bien en développant des biens et des services qui s’attaquent directement aux problèmes les plus insolubles du monde. Dans cet article, nous explorons les attentes intégrées dans deux de leurs produits : un dispositif de diagnostic au point de service et une lanterne à énergie solaire. Nous montrons comment ces objets matérialisent à la fois une éthique minimaliste des soins et un engagement maximaliste en faveur de l’accès universel à la santé et à l’énergie. Nous proposons que de tels engagements maximalistes sont fondamentalement utopiques. Les concepteurs de ces biens humanitaires n’envisagent pas leurs objets comme des solutions provisoires ou des « pansements » pour des défaillances systémiques bien ancrées, mais plutôt comme les éléments constitutifs de nouveaux types d’infrastructures universelles fournies par le marché. Nous retraçons le travail nécessaire pour augmenter les effets humanitaires de ces dispositifs à travers des processus de design, de fabrication et de distribution. Pour les entrepreneurs humanitaires, nous soutenons qu’échouer à répondre aux attentes est un échec à grande échelle.
Este trabajo plantea un ejercicio de interpretación del relato bíblico de los macabeos, su rebelión y resistencia religiosa, política y militar frente a la imposición imperial desde algunas ...perspectivas recogidas de los escritos de Walter Benjamin sobre la juventud. Se ponen de relieve temas como la situación religiosa ante el horizonte de la Ilustración; la relevancia que tiene la religión en los movimientos sociales juveniles; el mesianismo reinterpretado por el movimiento romántico de los intelectuales judíos de la Mitteleuropa, según lo ha estudiado el académico Michael Löwy para, finalmente, ensayar una reflexión sobre la ideología de la soberanía militar en contraste con el mesianismo utópico.
My key objective in this article is to explore the history of the concept of utopia and its application in really existing social, political, economic and cultural forms. Starting with a ...consideration of what I call the economy of utopia, I theorise the desire for the ideal society in terms of a deeply human drive to seek to overcome vulnerability, limitation and finitude that is set upon failure and the fall towards dystopia by virtue of the fact that it is this very lack that defines the being of the human animal. Following this section of the article, in the second part of my piece, I move on to trace the history of utopia from the visions of Ancients, through the idealism of the Moderns, up to the champions of the theory of the end of history and a utopian version of capitalism. Finally, in conclusion, I focus on the catastrophic impacts of this global utopia of capitalism realised in the form of the Anthropocene and imagine a truly human, tragic utopia founded upon a recognition of our constitutive lack, vulnerability and finitude.
Images of ideal societies, utopias, are all around us; yet, little is known of how utopian visions affect ordinary people’s engagement with their societies. As goals for society, utopias may elicit ...processes of collective self-regulation, in which citizens are critical of, or take action to change, the societies they live in. In three studies, we investigated the psychological function of utopian thinking. In Study 1, measured utopianism was correlated with the activation of three utopian functions: change, critique, and compensation. In Study 2, primed utopian thinking consistently enhanced change and criticism intentions. Study 3 also provided evidence that mental contrasting—first imagining a utopian vision and then mentally contrasting the current society to this vision—underlies the facilitative effect of utopian thinking on societal engagement.
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.
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.
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,
07/02/2024, Volume:
49, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
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.
PDF
