Much work in utopian studies focuses on the cognitive shifts that utopianism enacts, and how these may help us navigate routes to alternative social formations. The articles in this Special Collection draw on this tradition, whilst considering the role that embodiment and mediation play in utopianism within, against and beyond our present. Collectively, they suggest that entanglements of bodies and media (mediated bodies, embodied media) provide ways to rethink (and feel) the future through recollections, representations and retellings of pasts and abandoned alternatives.
Papers draw on a range of theoretical traditions and practices. Insights from Marxism, affect theory, queer theory, anarchism, feminism and the Black Radical Tradition are brought to bear on topics including literature, pedagogy, documentary film and autonomia.
The work presented here was supported by the Leverhulme International Research Network Imaginaries of the Future: Historicising the Present (2014-2017), which was dedicated to thinking through how we (might) think about the future. The network did not advance specific visions of the future as such, but rather sought to develop strategies for conceptualising ‘the future’ without doing violence to the bodies that might inhabit and (re)produce it. Its focus was utopian rather than futurological, and it was grounded in the knowledge that the utopian cannot be reduced to the fanciful, impossible or authoritarian. Many of the articles in this collection were presented at one of the network's six symposia, and all adhere to the spirit of the network. This collection in particular draws on papers presented at or which resonate with two of the networks' symposiums: 'Utopian Bodies and Media', held at the Montreal Marriot Delta Hotel in October 2014 in collaboration with network partner Brian Greenspan from Carleton University; and 'Utopia After the Human', held at Cornell University in April 2017 in collaboration with network partner Keith Evan Green from Cornell University.
Two further volumes are in publication with the Open Library of Humanities: Politics, Poetics, Place and Utopia at the Border.
The collection is co-edited by: Dr Nathaniel Coleman, Imaginaries of the Future Research Lead, Dr David M. Bell, Imaginaries of the Future Network Facilitator (2015-17), and Dr Adam Stock, Imaginaries of the Future Network Facilitator (2014-15).
Featured image by Noxi shared under a CC BY-NC license.
Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies & Media
Re-Imagining Artistic Subjectivities within Community Projects
Kate Heron Pahl and Steve Pool
2018-07-23 Volume 4 • Issue 2 • 2018 • 2
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Plasticity, the Genetics of Difference, and the Repair of Utopia
Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor
2018-08-03 Volume 4 • Issue 2 • 2018 • 5
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
E-topia: Utopia after the Mediated Body
George Themistokleous
2018-10-05 Volume 4 • Issue 2 • 2018 • 27
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Delineating the Missing Film Genre: Eutopia
Sam Bunn
2019-06-27 Volume 5 • Issue 1 • 2019 • 46
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Minor Apocalypses: Italian Autonomia, Utopia, and Women
Maurizia Boscagli
2020-07-22 Volume 6 • Issue 2 • 2020 • 6
Also a part of:
Special Collection: Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Special Collections
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Humour as a Human Right
Cultural Heritage Data for Research: Opening Museum Collections, Project Data and Digital Images for Research, Query and Discovery
Literature as Imaginary Archive: Ephemera and Modern Literary Production
Caliban's Mirror: Reflections of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde
Cultural Representations of Machine Vision
The Public Curatorship of the Medieval Past
Medieval Minds and Matter
Representing the Medieval in Popular Culture: Remembering the Angevins
The Politics and History of Menstruation: Contextualising the Scottish Campaign to End Period Poverty
Production Archives 03: Archival Practices
Production Archives 02: Production Contexts
Production Archives 01: Puppets for Action
Representing Classical Music in the Twenty-First Century
The Pathological Body: European Literary and Cultural Perspectives in the Age of Modern Medicine
Binary Modernisms: Re/Appropriations of Modernist Art in the Digital Age
Local and Universal in Irish Literature and Culture
Reading in Ruins: Exploring Posthumanist Narrative Studies
The Language of Perspective
Nancy Astor, Public Women and Gendered Political Culture in Interwar Britain
The Working-Class Avant-Garde
Colonialities in Dispute: Discourses on Colonialism and Race in the Spanish State
Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy
Writers and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918–2018
Literature, Law and Psychoanalysis
Muslims in the Media
Encounters between Asian and Western Art in the 20th and 21st centuries: a liberating influence for Asia?
Waste: Disposability, Decay, and Depletion
Pride Revisited: Cinema, Activism and Re-Activation
New Approaches to Late Medieval Court Records
Utopian Art and Literature from Modern India
Right-Wing Populism and Mediated Activism: Creative Responses and Counter-Narratives
Representing Climate: Local to Global
Cultivating Spheres: Agriculture, Technical Communication, and the Publics
Freedom After Neoliberalism
The Medieval Brain
Remaking Collections
New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies
Imaginaries of the Future 01: Bodies and Media
Imaginaries of the Future 02: Politics, Poetics, Place
Imaginaries of the Future 03: Utopia at the Border
Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing
#Agreement20
What’s Left? Marxism, Literature and Culture in the 21st Century
New Voices in Jewish-American Literature
Authors, Narratives, and Audiences in Medieval Saints’ Lives
From TV To Film
American Literature & the Transnational Marketplace
Mnemosyne
Healing Gods, Heroes and Rituals in the Graeco-Roman World
The Abolition of the University