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Utopian Acts Utopian Acts
  • Home
  • About
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    • News
    • Exploring Utopian Acts
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    • Utopian Acts 2018
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    • SAHJ Special Issue
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Utopian Acts is a radical network investigating the relationship between utopia and activism across fields including academia, art, technology and science.

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Latest News
    • Our first conference report!Our first conference report!
      October 11, 2018We’d like to say a big thank you to Sasha Myerson for writing a generous and insightful report of Utopian Acts 2018. And thank you to all the people at Vector and the British Science Fiction Association for publishing the report.  Check it out! Conference Report: Utopian Acts 2018 Ayesha Tan Jones, Indigo Zoom: The Awakening (2018)...
    • Utopian Acts 2018 keynotesUtopian Acts 2018 keynotes
      October 8, 2018L: Professor Davina Cooper; R: Professor Lynne Segal The keynote speakers for Utopian Acts 2018 were Professor Davina Cooper and Professor Lynne Segal, and we’re thrilled to make the audio recordings of their keynote presentations available here. Professor Davina Cooper Davina Cooper is an academic at King’s Law School, writing on radical government, social experiments and new conceptualising. Her last book was Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. She has just finished a book on reimagining the state, and started a new ESRC project on the Future of Legal Gender. In the 1980s, she was a Haringey councillor. Why Conceptual Futures Matter (And how to take them up) This talk explores the political work that concepts can do. Focusing on the state and gender, as two quite different concepts, Professor Cooper explores radical fantasies of what they might come to mean, and the different ways these imagined futures can be played out in the present. A version of the recording with slides is also externally hosted here. Professor Lynne Segal Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. Her books include Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men; and Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. She co-wrote Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright. Her most recent book is Radical Happiness, which explores the radical potential of being together. Resources for Hope: Moments of Collective Joy In popular culture around the globe, dystopian visions have all but obliterated utopian hopes for more favourable futures. Yet, resistance to the disorders of the present can also be seen rising and falling as circumstance allow, sometimes enabling us to renew our attachments to life by embracing both its real sorrows as well as its possible joys, while telling us that some form of utopian spirit is now essential for us to envisage any tolerable future at all. A version of the recording with slides is also externally hosted here....
    • SAHJ special issue – Call for Papers!SAHJ special issue – Call for Papers!
      September 24, 2018We’re really thrilled to announce that we’ve joined forces with the Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal, an open access peer-reviewed international academic collaboration, to publish a special issue expanding upon the themes and directions of the Utopian Acts 2018 conference which we ran in September. The Call for Papers for the special issue is now live and is open to anyone, not just those who presented at Utopian Acts 2018. We’re looking for both academic papers and work which is irregular, unusual, brave, and multi-modal – surprise us! Most of all, we’re looking for work which isn’t obscured with complex academic jargon, but which is clear, accessible, and powerful, with the potential to create new bonds of solidarity between activism and scholarship. We are first asking for short abstracts, with a separate deadline for the complete work, so please get your abstracts in by the 26th October 2018. All the other information you will need is on the Call for Papers. We look forward to reading your words! Battle of Cable Street mural, Shadwell, London...
    • Thank you!Thank you!
      September 3, 2018Of late and for good reason, social media has been regarded as dystopian, rather than utopian. But occasionally, in minor but important ways, our lives on the Internet resemble the best and purest kinds of interlinked, communal, and open lives we have dreamt up. In the two days since Utopian Acts 2018 – our big, exhausting, wonderful experiment in dreaming better together – concluded in a cacophony of synthesisers and hugs, we have been soaking up the lives of new and old utopian friends online. We’re sharing some of our favourite photos of the day below, and there are so many thoughtful and joyful tweets to read through under the hashtag #utopianacts18. But one of the things we’ve most enjoyed in the last few days is watching how you have all continued your utopian lives beyond Utopian Acts. We see you going to drag shows and feminist dance nights, commenting on each other’s posts, continuing the discussions you started and absorbing the discoveries you’ve made. It’s hard to come up with what feels like a proper and fitting response to Utopian Acts, perhaps because so much happened over the course of those twelve hours. In between solving IT problems (Windows is truly the least utopian operating system), helping lost attendees, and drinking large cups of hot Ribena, we had time to make new friends, hug old ones, and listen to incredible, challenging, and thoughtful papers, workshops, and discussions which will take a long time, as they should, to circulate through our feelings and thoughts, before hopefully making their way back out into the world through our own actions. We want to thank everyone who came to, worked at, and helped with Utopian Acts 2018, and we want to be able to do so individually and mindfully, but as far as an expression of universal love and gratitude goes, indulge us in this. Without those of you who unhesitatingly said “yes” a year ago; those of you who gave time, presence, and money to making your part of Utopian Acts the best it could be; those of you who cooked the food, fuelled us with drinks, and gave us a cosy space to be in all day long; those of you who came with huge ideas and those who came with small stories; those who wanted to teach and those who were ready to learn; those who danced; those who built utopias out of tables and chairs, out of paper, out of string and glue; those who found time to ask each other if there was anything they needed; those who explained and argued and questioned across social, cultural, and political lines to find new and common ground: without each and every one of you, exactly how you were on this beautiful day, utopia would be that little bit further away. All of these are utopian acts. To bring moments like these into the often difficult and frightening world of the present is exactly what we set out to do a year ago, and so we couldn’t be more happy and more grateful. Thank you. Raphael Kabo and Katie Stone...
    • Political JoyPolitical Joy
      June 12, 2018In a solo utopian mission / to support one of my very impressive friends I went to a drag king cabaret night last week. It was the culmination of a five week drag camp organised by PECS and Brainchild (check them out) so every one of the fine gentleman performing had never done so before. It was about testing out new ideas, trying on new identities and finding new ways of captivating an audience. It was exciting and funny and sexy and it made me think a lot about how experimental utopianism could be, how open to tripping up and forgetting lines and seeing the tape that’s holding it all together. If you have thought about drag, or queerness, or performance, or education, or DIY activism in relation to utopianism I invite you to consider sending in a submission of interest to Utopian Acts, a day where we will explore some of these ideas. This could be an academic paper, a workshop, a conversation with a friend or indeed your own experiments with drag (however experienced you are). Submissions are open till 29th June! I also coincidentally read Testo Junkie last week (and took part in an amazing discussion about it at the Transitional States exhibition in the Peltz gallery – an exhibition which I highly recommend that you visit, particular shoutout to Raju Rage who spoke wonderfully) so for anyone looking for some more inspiration here is what Paul B. Preciado has to say about his experience in drag king workshops: My first drag king workshop is an initiatory exercise, the first step in an open process of mutation … Little by little, a denser and denser fabric of voices is created; it surrounds us and allows us to cover ourselves with shared words, creating a collective sekond skin. Under that protective membrane, through a political magnifying glass, we can see that femininity and masculinity are the gears of a larger system in which every single person participates structurally. Knowledge liberates. It produces a certain political joy that I have never experienced before.Testo Junkie, Paul B. Preciado How utopian is that?...
    • 50 Years of Utopianism50 Years of Utopianism
      June 4, 2018On Monday I went to York to the Fifty Years of Revolution conference organised by Clare Bielby and Claire Chambers. There is something very straightforwardly utopian about spending two glorious days of sun in a treehouse full of feminists. It sounds like something which might happen in a novel by one of the great feminist utopian writers of the 1970s. It feels, as one of these wonderful feminists said of Marge Piercy’s novel ‘Woman on the Edge of Time’, like “taking a breath of fresh air when you are suffocating”. No such utopian venture is without mitigation. The neoliberal, imperialist, patriarchal, homophobic trappings of institutional academia provided an unwelcome but inescapable framework. We spoke of pain and trauma and things we were rightly ashamed of and those systems which would like us to remain incapacitated by unearned shame. But under and through and around those pressures we found a way to persist. It was hard and it was funny and it was utopianism in action. We welcome all thoughts about feminism and anti-racism and revolutionary action and the ways in which they intersect with utopianism. The deadline for submissions to our call for papers is 29th June but if you’d like more time please drop us a line expressing your interest and we can work out an alternate timeframe. With warm thanks to the University of York’s Centre of Women’s Studies and to Clare and Claire for dreaming up this event. And for all of the people who made it so fabulous: Rosemary Hill, Kim Allen, Rose Simpson, Miriam Tola, Ruth Kelly, Boriana Alexandrova-Isgate, Rafaela N Pannain, Laura Loyola-Hernandez, Mererid Puw Davies, Tanya Williams, Evelyn Preuss, Edward John Still, Hannah Dwyer Smith, Roxanne Douglas, Stevi Jackson, Katy Sian, Laura Schwartz and Ann Kaloski-Naylor. I leave you with a collection of images drawn from and inspired by some of the glorious talks I was lucky enough to witness....
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Exploring Utopian Acts

Exploring Utopian Acts is a fortnightly series of essays and multi-media blog pieces on utopian themes. Click here for more information.

    • Performative Utopia: An Introduction to Professional WrestlingPerformative Utopia: An Introduction to Professional Wrestling
      Dominica DuckworthDecember 3, 2018Professional wrestling is fake. Let’s get that out of the way. People may tell you that it used to be real, or we used to think it was real. That it was the 1984 TV news expose, where a former wrestler taught a tiny journalist to throw him around, or the 1996 Madison Square Garden Curtain Call, where the performers broke character after a brutal fight to hug, that exposed the business. That it was real before the war – which war? Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t....
    • Reclaiming Utopian Activism: Part 2Reclaiming Utopian Activism: Part 2
      Kate MeakinNovember 19, 2018In the last decade or so, many political commentators have considered the era of left melancholia as nearing its end, precipitated by a contemporary resurgence of transnational radical politics and cyberactivism since the economic crash of 2008-9....
    • Reclaiming Utopian Activism: Part 1Reclaiming Utopian Activism: Part 1
      Kate MeakinNovember 19, 2018Utopian studies scholar Lyman Tower Sargent, in his seminal 1994 article “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited”, defines utopianism as multi-dimensional “social dreaming – the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives and which usually envision a radically different society than the one in which the dreamers live”....
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