First Workshop in Edinburgh (April 23-24, 2024)
Introduction
Beyond Failure: The Promise of Utopia
In this first workshop, we seek to explore, positively and critically, the take-up and potential of utopian experiments to counter wider societal failings and experiences of failure. Our discussion will address how utopian fiction, design initiatives, community spaces, and the mobilisation of utopian desires and hopes, across different temporalities, get created and inhabited in response to wider oppressive social practices, including the competitive practices of mainstream societies, with their success/failure dyads.
Content
Utopia can seem to counter failure in several distinct ways. One turn to utopia is as shelter, escape, and comfort from the failings and failures that wider societies produce. Another takes up utopia within mainstream life as a radical ambition and ethos, rejecting notions of withdrawal and boundedness that escaping to utopia sometimes suggests. A third approach rejects the divisions between these two moves and foregrounds, instead, their interconnections.
By exploring these and other relationships between failure and utopia, where utopia is framed as an antidote to failure, the workshop will explore several questions. These include: How do utopian projects respond to experiences of failure outside or beyond utopia? What counter-practices and ethoi do utopias offer (for instance, the emphasis on collaboration and cooperation rather than competition)? Can utopias’ alternatives be imagined and enacted in ways that undo wider cultures of failure? What can storytelling, both historical and contemporary, tell us about the desire to escape from social and interpersonal failure? These and related questions will guide the discussion during our first event.
This is a closed workshop, with limited places available to people who are not presenting a paper.