Conclusion

The final chapter summarizes the ideas presented in the previous chapters, highlights important issues, and opens up new perspectives for music education research. It discusses the utopian energy of music education and presents ideas about how to reconceptualize music education in view of social change. It reconnects the concepts developed in the previous chapters with significant notions in utopian studies to highlight the potential of this new music education approach, particularly in view of global crises. This final chapter tries to encourage utopian thinking to refine music education’s societal mission, but without forgetting or marginalizing its artistic and aesthetic dimensions.

Is the Future Soviet? USSR-2061 and the Reality of Utopia

USSR-2061 is a Russian futuristic online project that imagines a new USSR a century after Gagarin’s journey into space. This article connects the project to Soviet space utopianism and the nostalgia that followed it, while seeing USSR-2061 and its artefacts in the light of utopian studies. In particular, the project’s hesitation with regard to utopianism and its thirst for realism are situated within a classical utopian problem of how to achieve real, not only imaginary, transformations. Such realism generally coincides with Levitas’ (2013) framework of utopia as a method, and, as the analysis shows, it hinders the construction of “an image of a future” at which the project aims. Instead, the resulting narratives and visions commonly overlap with the official Russian political discourse that makes use of Soviet nostalgia, or fall into retrofuturistic replications of commonly satirized Soviet discourses. However, a different way of constructing utopia is also present in USSR-2061, even if it is never highlighted. To make utopia possible in anti-utopian times, one might need to rethink its place of possibility or topos. Theoretically, such an alternative is presented in connection to Latour’s (2017) Terrestrial, a place with agency that in utopian terms presupposes a transgression of the boundary between the real and imaginary, the political and cultural. In the same line, the paper argues that USSR-2061 might attempt the construction of a new utopia through rethinking space. This might be fostered through the inclusion of cosmist ideas such as those of Vladimir Vernadsky and Alexander Chizhevsky, whose intersections with Latourian framework have previously been observed.

(Im)possible Escape? H. G. Wells, Utopia and the World State

This article reviews the recent monograph by Maxim Shadurski, The Nationality of Utopia. H. G. Wells, England, and the World State (New York: Routledge, 2020) in the context of utopian studies on the one hand, and the political ideas of the nation state vs. world state on the other.

Internet users’ utopian/dystopian imaginaries of society in the digital age: Theorizing critical digital literacy and civic engagement

This article proposes a theoretical framework for how critical digital literacy, conceptualized as incorporating Internet users’ utopian/dystopian imaginaries of society in the digital age, facilitates civic engagement. To do so, after reviewing media literacy research, it draws on utopian studies and political theory to frame utopian thinking as relying dialectically on utopianism and dystopianism. Conceptualizing critical digital literacy as incorporating utopianism/dystopianism prescribes that constructing and deploying an understanding of the Internet’s civic potentials and limitations is crucial to pursuing civic opportunities. The framework proposed, which has implications for media literacy research and practice, allows us to (1) disentangle users’ imaginaries of civic life from their imaginaries of the Internet, (2) resist the collapse of critical digital literacy into civic engagement that is understood as inherently progressive, and (3) problematize polarizing conclusions about users’ interpretations of the Internet as either crucial or detrimental to their online engagement.

Fictional games and utopia

This interdisciplinary article discusses fictional games, focusing on those appearing in works of sf. ‘Fictional games’ are playful activities and ludic artefacts that were conceptualised to be part of fictional worlds. These games cannot - or at least were not originally meant to - be actually played. The article’s objective is to explore how fictional games can function as utopian devices. Drawing on game studies, utopian studies and sf studies, the first half of the article introduces the notion of fictional games and provides an initial articu­lation of their utopian potential. The second half focuses, instead, on the analysis of one (science-)fictional game in particular: the game of Azad, described in Iain M. Banks’s 1988 sf novel The Player of Games. This analysis is instrumental in clarifying the utopian qualities that are inherent in the activity of play such as its being uncertain and contingent. By presenting relationships of power through a game (and, finally, as a game), utopian fictional games such as Azad serve as a reminder that every socio-political situation - even the most dystopian ones - is ultimately indeterminate and retains the possibility of change.

Things Are Heating Up

This article offers a short scholarly reflection on the 20th international conference of the Utopian Studies Society, themed around utopia, dystopia and climate change, and hosted by Monash University’s European centre in Prato, Italy. Engaging with numerous threads which emerged organically across multiple panels, this article positions the notions of change, resistance, and activism within the heart of the conference’s focus. In doing so, it relates the implications of these discussions to the wider ecological future of the planet, asking how utopian ideals are enacted, challenged and expanded in a time of global crisis. Simultaneously, it turns its gaze inwards, applying its thinking to the structures of the conference and Society itself, asking how utopian principles may be practised within the workings of utopian studies itself, as well as the wider academic field.

Utopianism in the Age of Capitalocene

This article explores the social and political imagination of ‘the Anthropocene’ and the utopian counter images that can be derived from it. From the utopian studies perspective, I argue that the Anthropocene cannot provide sufficient societal alternatives for the current ecological predicament. This is due to the fact that the concept of Anthropocene relies too heavily on the image of abstract humanity to be able to offer real societal alternatives. It cannot name the social system we live in and, therefore, it cannot fundamentally challenge existing social arrangements. Based on utopian social theory, I conceptualize utopia as a counter image of the present motivated by a desire for better being. The contents and the politically transformative potentials of utopian counter-images depend on the conceptualization of the present itself. I contrast the utopian potentials of ‘the Anthropocene’ with that of ‘the Capitalocene’ which is more apt in outlining the social conditions of the present. Thus, the Capitalocene as a concept opens up more radical possibilities for imagining societal alternatives by conceptualizing the present socially.

Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better: IR theory, utopia, and a failure to (re)imagine failure

Important scholarship in International Relations (IR) theory engages with the utopian tradition in order to render it ‘realistic’, whereby ‘failed’ utopian projects become necessarily unrealistic, and anti-political. The paper suggests such scholarship is informed by a narrow chronotic register, and a dichotomous ontology of chronos and kairos derived in part from the work of Karl Mannheim and E.H. Carr. As such, utopian scholarship in IR constructs a self-reinforcing relationship between change and realism, whereby only ‘realistic’ interventions can affect normatively desirable change, and therefore only interventions that are possible under current social and political conditions are normatively desirable. Drawing on the idea that the quest for utopia must always fail, the paper suggests that IR theory should be far more attuned to ‘failure’ than as simply a phenomenon that helps define the boundary between the realistic and unrealistic. The paper draws on non-canonical literatures from utopian studies and anarchism, to furnish an alternative ‘no-point’ form of utopianism that dissolves the chronos/kairos binary and thus engages neither in universalist and violent end-point, nor institutionally compromised ‘mid-range’ utopianism. This acts to reconceptualise ‘failure’ in excess of itself, a productive site for IR scholarship, and a political archive for movements and struggles to learn from.

‘If we Can’t Have a Conversation with our Past, then What will be Our Future?’: HIV/AIDS, Queer Generationalism, and Utopian Performatives in Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance

As the HIV/AIDS epidemic approaches its fifth decade, and emerging generations of queer-identified youth experience and conceptualize the virus in new ways, questions surrounding the memorialization and historicization of queer history have arisen within the arts. In the domain of theatre in particular, as mainstream revivals of crisis-era plays such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1991) proliferate, criticisms have arisen that such revivals feed into a narrative of the so-called ‘AIDS nostalgia’, pushing the idea that HIV/AIDS is a thing of the past and ignoring the ways in which the virus continues to shape individual social and sexual experiences. Recently, however, new plays such as Jonathan Harvey’s Canary (2010), the GHP Collective’s The Gay Heritage Project (2013), and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (2018) have explicitly addressed this issue, conceptualizing a revised queer politics of HIV/AIDS that transcends Angels’ famous call for ‘The Great Work’ to begin. This article explores how The Inheritance in particular problematizes ‘AIDS nostalgia’ and configures novel approaches to the politics of HIV/AIDS in the twenty-first century. Alongside scholarship within the field of queer utopian studies such as José Estaban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009) and Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance (2005), it analyses the ways in which Lopez’s play employs utopian performatives to move towards a new politics of queer heritage.