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with “old” media (television, radio, and the printed press), and represented as a “walking dead,” doomed to be superseded and buried by a web-based direct democracy.
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.
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.
What is it like to be a lesbian? The book Amora, by Natalia Borges Polesso (2018), although it circulates the subject, avoids a direct answer, but presents some affections densities and modulations ...of secret love, which are clues to the invisibility of lesbian affection. To invest in the theme, we will focus on the short story Vó, a senhora é lésbica? (Grandma, are you a lesbian?), dialoguing with Monique Wittig and other authors who proposed a lesbian utopia, using the literary text itself as a self-reflective resource. The writer’s effort in the short story is to break with the tradition of silencing and to propose an opening of topics for discussion within the family in order to break through heterosexual oppression.
Moving between different homelands involves constructing utopias of place and self. Such mythical past, present and future selves are intertwined with the construction of imaginary homelands in the ...writings of transnational Canadians, for whom the quintessential questions of the Canadian imagination – Who am I? and Where is here? – continue to be unsolvable dilemmas.Utopie del sé in patrie immaginarie L’intrecciarsi di rappresentazioni utopiche di sé passati, presenti e futuri con la costruzione di patrie immaginarie emerge in modo prominente nella scrittura di soggetti canadesi transnazionali, per i quali le domande centrali dell’immaginario canadese – chi sono? e dove è qui? – continuano ad essere dilemmi irrisolvibili.
L’assalto del 6 gennaio al Campidoglio di Washington termina la distopia di Trump: il paese rimane diviso come lo fu in passato con la Guerra Civile. Utopia e distopia si riferiscono a testi ...letterari. L’America è stata sempre la terra delle utopie, come realtà e come testi. Malgrado tutto, con Kamala Harris, vince il sogno o utopia americana.
Este artigo se propõe a compreender a relação entre os termos guerras culturais e utopia no campo do entretenimento por intermédio do filme “Barbie”. A repercussão da produção cinematográfica ...norte-americana “Barbie” jogou luz sobre a possibilidade de um produto cultural impactar distintas instâncias sociais. Ao mesmo tempo, o filme apareceu na mídia como uma tentativa de resolver o problema da obsolescência da boneca no contexto atual. A ambiguidade das impressões geradas por “Barbie”, o impacto estético e a respectiva abordagem de temas como sexismo e patriarcado pela produção hollywoodiana serão os elementos aqui utilizados para compreendermos o sentido e o espaço ocupado por ideias como utopia e guerras culturais na sociedade contemporânea
Imaginação, criatividade e utopia Victoria Nicolielo Reginatto; João Pedro Braga de Carvalho
Revista de Ciências do Estado (Online),
12/2021, Volume:
6, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Editorial do dossiê do volume 6, número 2, ano 2021, cujo tema é ESTUDOS BRASILEIROS: UTOPIAS DEMOCRÁTICAS E IMAGINAÇÃO INSTITUCIONAL.
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