[Commlist] Utopian Studies Society CFP

Utopian Studies Society Conference 2022 - Call for Papers
July 13th – 15th, the University of Brighton, England.

Conference Title: Opening Utopia: New Directions in Utopian Studies

	Keynote Speakers to include Professor Jack Halberstam on Queering Utopia
 Please note the extended deadline for submitting abstracts – April 
30th, 2022. This deadline has been extended in part to show solidarity 
with the staff involved in the UCU Pension and Four Fights Disputes, and 
with the students who support them. 		
The 2022 Utopian Studies Society (USS) Conference is dedicated to an 
exploration of radical utopian thinking and revolutionary praxis. It 
will create a space where we can explore the role of utopian thinking 
and practice in addressing some of the fundamental challenges of our 
times. As part of this exploration, we wish to engage those who use 
utopian thinking and practices to understand our present moment, its 
patterns of continuity and discontinuity with the times which generated it.
The organisers of the last year’s conference noted that our time ‘is a 
turning point for Utopian Studies.’ In agreement, the organisers of this 
year’s conference wish to explore what our time is made of: our aim is 
to turn the concept of utopia, its long history and the contestations 
which make that history, to the present. To help thematise this, the 
conference organisers have focused on ‘hope’ as a key contested concept, 
one which can act as a focaliser for the conference’s exploration of the 
situation of utopia in the twenty-first century.
It is our premise that there needs to be something fierce in any 
attachment to utopian thinking in these times. The world of the 
twenty-first century seems to be one committed not merely to the 
cancellation of hope but to the drowning of it in an excess of cruelty. 
That fierceness cannot be forged out of commitment alone, however: it 
requires a depth of understanding both of itself and of what it throws 
itself against. Do we yet have that depth understanding of utopian hope 
in what are arguably anti-utopian times?

Utopian thinking – and the scholarship engaging with it – has always had 
an antagonistic edge: a sharp and unyielding critical relationship to 
the way things are in favour of how they might be. This presence of a 
critical relationship to the present is differentiated from the politics 
embedded in other models of thought by the future-focus of utopianism, 
the founding and sublation of critique by hope. Is this a model of 
thinking or even an ideal of thinking sufficient to our own moment, however?
Hope – Utopian and Otherwise
The 2022 USS Conference is dedicated to exploring the situation of 
utopia and of utopian thinking in the current conjuncture. It is 
specifically meant to focus on how ‘hope’ is active in the present, the 
forms it takes in politics, culture and philosophy. Not all forms of 
hope are utopian however: we anticipate the conference engaging with the 
mobilisation of hope in discourses which are explicitly or implicitly 
anti-utopian - whether at work in the fields of politics and culture or 
in the practices of everyday life.

USS and Utopia beyond the University
As part of the turn to the present of this USS Conference, we aim to 
design a programme which centres work designed to blur or break the 
well-policed and expensive borders between the university and the 
communities within which universities sit. To this end, we are proposing 
working with local activists in Brighton to establish some in-person and 
remote-access events which will highlight and explore hope as it is 
present in the politics of migrant-solidarity, anarchist and queer 
groups and spaces. We wish to open this thread of the conference to the 
work of others outside the formal limitsof academia or who are inside an 
academic space pushing out. If you are involved with some work in your 
community (we understand communities as being social rather than sheerly 
geographical spaces, made by relationships and practices rather than 
maps), please consider how you could be involved and get in touch.
The Organising Committee encourages individuals and research groups to 
curate their own panel proposals as a way of giving topics, problems and 
questions the significant scope they deserve. We also welcome individual 
abstracts which we hope to build into a number of thematic panels to 
facilitate delegates’ navigation of the conference. Potential topics for 
either panels or individuals include (but are not limited to):

Hope in or as solidarity work
Neoliberal forms of hope
Does hope need to be decolonised? Indigenous hope
Queer forms of hope
Global ecocide and catastrophic hope
Hope, post-individualism, and communism Culture is not Enough: hope in 
dystopian and post-apocalyptic fictions
Methodological questions and hope, or the affordances and limits of hope 
as a concept
The politics of hope?
Utopian hope versus privatised hope
What happens to hope in dystopia?
Critical hope
Pessimistic hope
Radical and revolutionary hope
Hope and the university
Please send your abstract or other proposal to 
(utopianstudiesconf /at/ brighton.ac.uk) and indicate if you would like to 
engage remotely or in-person. The deadline for receipt of abstracts and 
proposals is now April 30th, 2022

Proposals for presenting high-quality research and practice are welcome 
in one of the following formats:
•	20-minute paper / please submit a 250-word abstract
•	Panel of multiple presentations (3 x 20-minute presentations for 
example or 5-7 x  flash papers) by named contributors and chair / please 
submit a proposal with 1) the outline of the panel theme; 2) the 
presenters, their format and notes on their papers; 3) the name of the 
chair.
•	Roundtable of multiple speakers on a theme with a named chair to fit 
into a 90-minute slot.
•	Workshops on topics related to the conference theme or utopian studies 
more broadly, including pedagogy and career development. •	We also 
welcome non-traditional formats for presenting work  -  duologues, 
performances, musical presentations, film screenings, debates and 
manifesto presentations, for example. The conference fee for in-person 
participation will be 120 GBP (full fee for 3 days). This in-person 
conference fee will be either refunded or not levied if covid infection 
rates make personal attendance impossible. The conference fee for online 
participation will be 20 GBP (3 days full fee)

About 20 waivers of the online conference fee will be available. To 
apply for a fee-waiver, please contact the USS/E Secretary at 
(justynagalantusse /at/ utopos.net) for an application form.




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