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Utopian Acts Utopian Acts
  • Home
  • About
  • Writing
    • News
    • Exploring Utopian Acts
  • Events
    • Utopian Acts 2018
    • Utopian Acts Special Issue Launch
  • Publications
    • SAHJ Special Issue
    • Help Us Build The World
  • Library
  • 
  • 

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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    • A Triple LaunchA Triple Launch
      May 3, 2019We’ve been busy since the Utopian Acts conference/festival in 2018 – last night, on May Day, we held a triple launch at Birkbeck, University of London. We brought into the world: ⭐️ The Studies in Arts and Humanities Journal Utopian Acts special issue, an open access behemoth of some of our very favourite critical writing on utopia. The special issue runs to over 170 pages, with reflections on the Utopian Acts conference; utopian poetics and poetry; critiques of utopian activism in Australia, Turkey, the Basque Country, and Brazil; insightful work on radical sexual violence organisations, Brexit, the 2018 UCU strikes in the UK; and a provocation on utopian ecocriticsm. We’re really proud of it, and it’s available to read for free and in open access on the SAHJ website now. 💥 Help Us Build the World, an anthology zine of utopian and activist art, fiction, storytelling games, and manifestos, available to buy and download here. Contributors to the zine included artists and writers who had participated at the conference and in the special issue, along with members our sister collective, the Beyond Gender Collective, whose Beyond Gender Manifesto is published in a remixed form in the zine and will be available to read in a more expansive form on our website in the coming weeks.  ⚡️ Last but not least, the Utopian Acts Library, a transient library of fiction, criticism, poetry and graphic novels about utopia and activism. An experiment in collective book distribution, users of the library will hopefully be able to borrow and trade books within London and beyond, and are encouraged to add to the library and annotate books for future readers. You can read more about the library, and inquire about borrowing books, here. Have a look at photos from the launch party here! Thank you so much to everyone who came last night – it was a wonderful, energising, enriching party. It’s becoming increasingly clear to us that the utopia we want is already happening – get involved in whatever way you can!...
    • A New Conference ReportA New Conference Report
      January 11, 2019‘Performing Fantastika’ – cover art by Sing Yun Lee Happy new year fellow utopians. I’m very excited to announce that another report of the Utopian Acts conference/festival/event we organised in September has been published. It was written by the wonderful Amy Butt and published in Fantastika Journal, an Open Access journal which focuses on Fantastic literature and culture of all kinds. Read Amy’s insightful and kind words here: https://fantastikajournal.com/publications/ And don’t forget that we are still running our Exploring Utopian Acts essay series (despite our festive hiatus) so if you have any short pieces you would like to share get in touch....
    • 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...
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Exploring Utopian Acts

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

    • Post-Colonial Problematics: Eddie GuerreroPost-Colonial Problematics: Eddie Guerrero
      Dominica DuckworthDecember 17, 2018Eddie was the youngest son of a famous wrestling legacy family. His father, Gory Guerrero, a Mexican champion, moved to El Paso, Texas, where Eddie was born. Famously, he pushed none of his four sons into the business – they all chose it, and all succeeded to some extent. Eddie was an international star, wrestling for years in Mexico, Japan and the USA, one of the hardest workers on the planet and also universally beloved, despite the fact he was almost always a heel....
    • 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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